In this interview, Isabella Channing recounts the spontaneous origins of her yoga and wellness studio, The Shack, in José Ignacio, Uruguay. She describes the chaotic moment of arriving at Montevideo airport with yoga mats, her bicultural upbringing (American father, Uruguayan mother, raised in New York), and how the family’s old wooden bunker inspired the studio’s name and sense of place. Isabella shares a deeply personal narrative of childhood trauma—the loss of her mother, chronic stress‑induced headaches, and failed medical treatments—followed by a transformative experience with yoga that eliminated her pain and triggered emotional release. From this breakthrough she developed a philosophy of self‑healing as an internal ecosystem that can be cultivated through thoughts, habits, and practices. She explains her mission to create a physical space where others can explore self‑healing tools, confront discomfort, and ultimately find a “golden refuge” within themselves. The interview weaves together themes of cultural identity, entrepreneurial risk, personal healing, and the intentional design of a community wellness environment.
Chapters
It was kind of like a little bit of an idea. Okay, I've never really opened my own business, never ever opened my own business, and it felt a little bit nuts, you know. But the how nuts it actually was landed when I, you know, I'd already rented the studio and this house, and I'd been in touch with the real estate agent, and I was packing my bags, and I was— my friends were like, what are you doing again and where are you going? I didn't sort of research the market so well. I didn't really have, you know, my business plan was really just the most simple idea of just trying something out. And that's where I found myself, you know, at the Montevideo airport, which is this feeling of the sort of absurdity of all of these yoga mats spilling out of my bags everywhere. And I'm arriving and I'm alone. I'm like, what am I doing here? Like, what? What? I— it was like the absurdity of it kind of hit me. I was born by an American father and a Uruguayan mother. I was born and raised in New York. And I would come down to Uruguay speaking Spanish with my mother, you know, every year to visit her vast family in Uruguay. So I have really kind of always felt like I came from two worlds, so to speak, and two cultures. And my father was a lover of wood and trees, and he was a sculptor. He, you know, would work in these very large-scale pieces of art. The only thing that was built on the property at the time when he bought it was this very old— it was sort of like a bunker in the middle of the woods. If I ever think about sort of maybe my first mystical experiences, it really can be in those woods, you know, going to the shack. And it was really my place in the world. I mean, I would travel, I would go to school, I would do this and that. And then if you ask me, where do you feel the most comfortable? Where do you feel the most happy or free or, or grounded or at home, it would be at the shack. It really— there was just this fantasy aspect of it, but at the same time a really grounding thing about the shack. When I decided in, I guess it was 2012, 2013, to open a, at the time, yoga studio with a wellness component, yoga studio in José Ignacio, you know, I was trying to figure out a name and I thought how lovely to bring the shack that's from the other part of my life, from the Northern Hemisphere, bring it down to the Southern Hemisphere. And from then on, the minute I remembered it, it stuck. And so it became the shack. Everybody has a personal story, some sort of healing that they are doing inside, and that mine is very much having to do kind of with this, the trauma of my mother passing away when I was very little, also a little too young to really be able to process it at about 10 or 11. I started to have headaches at such a young age. They said, well, where are these headaches coming from? And they were these low-grade, constant headaches. They weren't migraines. Finally, the neurologist, I guess, was working on it. It must just be depression. So psychiatrist, okay, antidepressants. After a while, very quickly realized this isn't helping. And so I even remember at age 11, I stopped it all and I said, okay, there's no cause for this. I'm going to have to just live with it. I was having stress headaches. You know, that was what it was. It was a suppressed emotion, right? It was a suppressed emotion. 100%. The body doesn't— And that's how my body was dealing with it. And I just remember saying, okay, I didn't find any solution in the doctor. So there's no nothing that I can do. I didn't talk about my headaches again until later on in university. I did my first yoga class. A few hours after my first yoga class, I came out and I said, oh my God, I don't have a headache. Wow. Something about this moving the energy around inside. And also after yoga, I would always be wanting to cry. And that the— I said, oh my gosh, something's happening here that is actually really kind of profound. And I'm like a little freaked out by it. But it, yeah, but it was like I myself am creating this massive change inside of myself that's generating all these things, but at the end of the day, alleviating these headaches I've had for so long. Well-being and healing is something that happens when we shift our focus inward. There is self-healing, that there is this state there you can create sort of an ecosystem or an environment inside yourself through your thoughts, your words, your actions, your habits, you know, that you create, creates energy that heals imbalances. So many things through traumas and lifestyle shift us out of that. Healing is an internal movement that happens, and so own it, take it back. What I really wanted is creating a space so that people can practice self-healing, and how they practice self-healing, well, that is the interesting part. There are lots of different tools. The hardest shift is to realize this is something that I have control over. The first initial sensation of discomfort for a lot of these sort of really important healing, daily, simple things are what dissuade people from continuing. But with time, not only does the discomfort— you realize it's a thin veil that disintegrates, but the space that you begin to occupy inside yourself is so vast and rich and beautiful, and it's a refuge. You have a refuge, this golden empire inside of yourself. It's like a coming home to yourself. Adverse or challenging or traumatic or difficult experiences can end up being our best friends. The process of transforming challenge that we feel in our life is what ends up deepening the purpose of our journey. Self-knowledge, it happens through the process of moving through these challenging or difficult things that can happen in our life.
