About Us
Welcome, we're so glad you're here.
Our Story
We're Amanda and Nicole, and we built GROUND for anyone ready to come home to themselves.
GROUND was born from a simple truth: that healing, movement, and community are not luxuries. They are essential. And for too long, they have been out of reach for too many people.
We built this studio because we know what it feels like to carry too much. The layers of stress, anxiety, and overwhelm that build up over time. The disconnection from your own body. The sense that somewhere along the way, you lost the thread back to yourself.
GROUND is where you find it again.
Every class weaves yoga and somatic wellness together to help you release what's stuck, move emotional energy, and regulate your nervous system. To clear the mind and open the heart. To cultivate attention, awareness, and a deeper relationship with yourself. To help you remember your power, your confidence, and your sense of self - and come all the way home to who you are.
This is a women-run studio built on the care economy and local power. That means we reinvest in this community, keep our doors open to everyone, and make sure that no one is ever priced out of showing up for themselves.
We built this for Putney.
We built this for you.
And we cannot wait to share it with you.
With love,
Amanda & Nicole
Meet The Team
Amanda Upton (she/her)
Co-Founder and Teacher
About:
Mom, certified yoga teacher and life coach, co-founder of GROUND.
I've always loved moving my body. Growing up, I swam competitively, danced in my living room for hours, rode bikes, and took long walks. But it wasn't until I found 5Rhythms, NIA, and yoga in my mid-twenties that I understood why movement had always helped me so much. It wasn't just a safe place, it was how I came home to myself. How I remembered, even if just in glimpses, who I was and what I was capable of.
I started teaching yoga at 25 because the immersion of practicing and teaching helped me shift unhealthy patterns and change my life. I've been teaching for over 20 years, owned Putney Moves in Putney, VT, and now co-founded GROUND with my partner Nicole.
My own healing - through trauma and divorce - is what brought somatic work to the center of everything I do. When we tend to our nervous systems, things shift. We get clearer, kinder, and more honest. I believe that's how we make the world better, one person at a time.
I hold a 500-hour yoga teaching certification and have trained with Shiva Rea, Baron Baptiste, D'ana Baptiste, Jenny Macke, Elena Brower, and Sara Pagano. I'm currently completing my Certificate in Somatic Education with Taryn Toomey, Jaycee Gossett, and Aimee Cox.
At the heart of everything I do is a commitment to helping people remember who they are - and to living in integrity with my own heart.
What is alive for me right now:
That movement is one of the most powerful ways we have to remember who we are. It has been central to my own healing and I'm devoted to offering that same doorway to others.
Nicole Hamilton (she/her)
Co-Founder and Coach
About:
Mom, Registered Nurse, certified health coach, and co-founder of GROUND.
I have always felt things deeply. Enough that for a long time, I wondered if something was wrong with me. But that sensitivity turned out to be the very thing that allows me to connect at a profound level, with myself and with others. Learning to trust that has been my own quiet journey home.
I've spent 15 years as a school nurse. This work has taught me so much about what young people need and how rarely they're given the space to actually feel it. I've watched kids learn to disconnect from their bodies before they ever had a chance to listen to them.
That's part of what led me to health coaching, and to co-founding GROUND.
I work with people 1:1 to help them build a more trusting relationship with their own bodies, setting goals that actually fit their lives, making changes that last, and learning to hear what they already know inside. I bring my clinical background together with somatic wellness practices, because I believe real health lives at the intersection of body, mind, and how we feel.
What's alive for me right now:
The work closest to my heart is with adolescent girls and women, helping them build body literacy, self-trust, and the confidence to advocate for their own wellbeing. Teaching young women to come home to themselves early is everything to me.
Candace Jensen
Teacher
About:
Candace Jensen (CYT 500hr) is an artist who has moonlighted as a yoga teacher since 2013. She completed her 200-hour and 500-hour certifications through Sri Yoga Teacher Trainings (in the Tantric Sri Vidya lineage) in San Francisco, CA from 2012-2015. She also has a 300 hour coaching & wellness certification in Ayurveda. She specializes in guiding Hatha Flow asana and Yoga Nidra. Candace has taught at public yoga studios, private arts orgs, museums and education institutions, and offered community yoga classes at various turns in Vermont, Philadelphia, and the California Bay Area.
What is alive for me right now:
Having just turned 40, I am getting ever more curious about how my personal yoga and movement practices can support longevity, strength and mobility, as well as my parasympathetic nervous system more than ever. This includes Hatha yoga with my beloved teachers of 15 years, mobility & weighted training, dance, lymphatic shaking, long walks in the woods, singing & chanting, and even some barre workouts!
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Hope Higbie
Teacher
About:
Hope has been practicing Kundalini yoga since 1994 and holds a KRI accredited 220 hour certificate. Through this yoga she incorporates ancient techniques of kriya, pranayama, mudra, meditation and sound to invoke healing which will strengthen the mind, body and heart. This practice inspires a connection and union with your authentic, creative self.
What is alive for me right now:
I am excited to teach again and to build community while exploring new deeper levels of healing and yoga
Tracy (Varada) Donahue
Teacher
About:
I have been a practitioner of various forms of physical and non physical Yoga since 1995. I began teaching Yoga in 2006. My favorite group Yoga experiences are breathing in unison and reciting mantras as call and response.
What is alive for me right now:
Recently I’ve become enamored with seeing the world and relationships through the lens of Ecofeminism. This ideology has become a common thread for me that runs throughout all my favorite things - gardening, spending time outdoors, reading, writing, supporting and elevating women in community, and tending to our one and only home - Mother Earth.