Linda Wells, founder of Linda Wellness Warrior, grew up surrounded by entrepreneurs. Her father has been self-employed for 43 years. Her grandfather owned a bar in Mattapan, a fish market in Dorchester and a real estate company. Her great-grandfather was a sharecropper and also owned a store, despite it being illegal for sharecroppers to do so.
It is no surprise that the entrepreneurial spirit trickled down to Wells. Her earliest experiences with entrepreneurship were from childhood. Living on a main street, Wells would pick flowers from her neighbors’ yards and set up shop to sell them to her neighbors for whatever price they felt like paying. It was this early exposure to entrepreneurship that helped pave the way for the creation of Linda Wellness Warrior.
Linda Wellness Warrior is an all-in-one wellness company operating in the Boston area. Wells offers yoga classes, personal coaching, and various retreats, all with a wide range of sizes, costs, and commitment levels to best suit everyone’s wellness needs. Taking advantage of the city’s abundance of locations, Wells offers programming all over Massachusetts from “Yoga in Franklin Park” which is a pay-what-you-wish yoga class in the park area to her “Mindfulness Retreat” which took place in Hingham, MA this past August.
Wells started her career as the director of a youth-serving agency. Working 13-hour days, she would come home exhausted without any energy to cook or take care of her own mental health. Extremely burnt out, Wells decided to leave her job at the agency and dedicate herself to the practice of wellness.
“I spent a year seeking out my joy trying to be playful,” she said. “I would go to playgrounds by myself or with my niece and nephew who were small at the time and I discovered I had a passion for wellness.”
As one of the only yoga teachers of color in Boston at the time, Wells’ road to teaching wellness wasn’t always an easy one.
“When I first started talking about wellness people thought I was looney tunes,” Wells said.
She first started teaching wellness under the guidance of her mentor, Leslie Salmon Jones, who founded the Allston-based yoga studio Afro Flow Yoga. Two years later, in 2013, Wells founded her own wellness company.
Her mission is to teach people how to take back their personal agency and manage their stress through physical movement and wellness, an issue close to Wells.
“One time, I went to the doctor and I was having an anxiety attack and didn’t know what that was at the time, and she just said I was fat,” Wells said. “So my journey began with me trying to make peace with this language and with people saying your health problems are because you’re fat.”
Wells strives to make her wellness programming – which consists of yoga, personalized wellness mentorship, and various retreats – retreats accessible to everyone regardless of socioeconomic status, race, physical ability and other identities that had been previously restricted from receiving proper wellness care. Her yoga classes are specifically designed for those whose needs aren’t met by traditional yoga like individuals with disabilities, seniors or people with health challenges.
Mary Lenihan, a resident of Jamaica Plain, is a regular at Linda Wellness Warrior’s “Yoga in Franklin Park.” Lenihan began her wellness journey by deciding to take up the practice of yoga after she retired.
“I had retired and was not able to get up and down off the floor,” Lenihan said. “Linda helped me because she was so accepting and helped me get more comfortable with my body.”
Wells is not only a teacher but also an inspiration to many in the wellness community. Roxbury resident Jaqueline Ortega started teaching alongside Wells nine years ago when she signed on to Linda Wellness Warrior as a substitute yoga instructor.
“She’s a pillar of the community, especially for people of color,” Ortega said. “There’s not a lot of yogis who teach and are people of color, so expanding the world of yoga to our community of people – Black, Brown, Indigenous – and letting us know this space [is] for us too is crucial.”
Wells has made her mark on the Boston community, revolutionizing the area’s wellness industry. As her career progresses, Wells hopes to open a retreat center that creates a space for people to receive the healing that they desire.
From her lived experience, both personal and professional, Wells ultimately wants people to trust their bodies and know the body is communicating with you all the time. Even the parts of your body you dislike or are finding discomfort with are calling out to you to give it attention, she said.
“It’s like when people talk about ‘oh, my belly this’ ‘this type of fat’ – maybe it wants you to love on it a little bit and pay it some attention,” Wells said.
Self care shouldn’t be a luxury but a necessity, and Wells has made it her mission to ensure that everyone’s wellness needs are met. With classes ranging from yoga to group coaching with both virtual and in-person offerings, Linda Wellness Warrior stays true to its mission.
“I think that I present something that is aspirational,” she said. “I don’t think it’s all perfect but I think that there are some people that are like ‘Wow, that is possible, I can live a different existence.’”
