We didn't start
with a studio.
We started with people.
Built without walls.
Rooted in Ward 8.
It started with a practice and a conviction. In 2021, Stephon Bradberry completed his yoga teacher training and began teaching across studios in Washington D.C. — developing his craft, his voice, and a growing sense that the wellness industry was failing the communities that needed it most.
In February 2022, he co-founded the Black Folx Wellness Collective — a community organization built to resource, uplift, and center Black healers and practitioners. That summer, BFWC began teaching at the Kennedy Center. By winter 2023, BFWC Sunday Soul Flow had become a weekly gathering, building the community that would eventually become FlowWell's heartbeat.
April 2024 was the public declaration. FlowWell Yoga + Wellness announced itself to the world — not as a studio, but as a movement. One month later, Unity Flow launched at Union Market. Within two weeks, 1,500 people had shown up.
That summer, FlowWell opened The Clearing — its first pop-up studio at Union Market. By December 2024, we made the deliberate decision to close it. Not because we failed. Because we were building toward something greater, and we needed the space to do it right.
We came back in February 2025 — 100 people. March 2025 — 450 people at Union Market. August 2025, we began classes at Bridge District: 1,000 people over ten classes. That September, we began lease negotiations on The Sanctuary.
July 2026. The doors open. Not a beginning. An arrival.
"The community showed up before we had a studio, before we had a name for what we were building. They've been here the whole time."
Do Justice. Get Free.
One class. One community. One nation. At a time.
At our core, FlowWell believes personal embodiment leads to collective change. A disembodied people can never be free — we cannot be free, healed, or whole without the presence of justice. By knowing enough about oneself to know something about your neighbor — and to want to change the conditions in which we all live.
If the point of yoga is to get us free, then we must do justice. We use this practice to strengthen our bodies and minds and to sturdy our hearts and souls. We help remind people that they are holy and sacred, needed and necessary — that the same spark that started the universe is the same thing inside of them. We are speaking of a politics of regard, where we see each other as our business: a bond and a charge to keep.
What we stand on.
These aren't aspirational statements. They are the operating principles of everything FlowWell does — on the mat and off it.
Radical love is our ethic. It grounds our teaching, our healing, and our pursuit of justice. Love is not soft here — it is the hardest and most necessary thing we do. It is what makes accountability possible and repair conceivable. We lead with it because everything else follows from it.
Freedom starts in the body. We practice presence, awareness, and alignment — within ourselves and the world around us. The body is not an obstacle to the practice. It is the practice. When we learn to inhabit ourselves fully, we begin to understand what it means to be free.
Doing the inner and outer work to dismantle systems of harm and build a world where every person can live fully. Justice is not a module or a section of our programming — it is the lens on everything. We are not partisan. But we are political. We have a point of view and a vision of how the world should orient.
Community means belonging and accountability in equal measure. It means we grow together, heal together, lead together, repair together, and love together — even when it's hard. Our community reflects the diversity of the district we serve: multiracial, intergenerational, people of every race, gender, orientation, faith, and background. Within that, the largest participation has come from Black women and Black queer men, whose presence is the heartbeat of what we're building.
Stephon J.
Bradberry
Stephon J. Bradberry is the founder and CEO of FlowWell Yoga + Wellness and co-founder of the Black Folx Wellness Collective. He launched FlowWell in 2022 with a conviction that personal embodiement drives collective change. — not a luxury for the few — and that the people most in need of its gifts are often the ones most shut out of its spaces.
Before FlowWell, Stephon built a career at the intersection of civic life, education, and strategic communications — serving in congressional staffing, DC government, and DEI and student affairs. That background shapes everything he builds: organizations that are rigorous, mission-driven, and unapologetically rooted in community.
As a yoga teacher, Stephon holds over five hundred hours of training, named one of DCs Best Teachers of 2025 & 2026. He has served as retreat faculty at the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health, co-presented at national gatherings on embodied wellness and civic engagement, and partnered with institutions including the Kennedy Center, American University, and the Kettering Foundation's Inclusive Democracy Project.
He is a forthcoming novelist. His intellectual and spiritual lineage draws from the Black Church tradition, Howard Thurman, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and prophetic theology — writers and thinkers who understood that the interior life and the public world are never truly separate.
FlowWell is the convergence of all of it: the civic work, the spiritual practice, the literary imagination, and the deep belief that a disembodied people can never be free.
The people who
run The Sanctuary.
Brittany Hill is the Director of Operations at FlowWell Yoga + Wellness, responsible for the day-to-day operations of The Sanctuary. She oversees Studio Assistant coordination and scheduling, Mindbody administration, space logistics, and everything that makes the studio run smoothly so teachers can focus on teaching and members can focus on practice.
Ebony Wheeler is FlowWell's Lead Teacher, responsible for the teaching team, sub coverage, and the quality and culture of every class on the schedule. She places teachers in the right class slots, manages FlowWell's Yoga Beyond the Studio teacher placements, and serves as the first point of contact for workshops and specialty programming.
Meet the teachers
behind every class.
FlowWell is a studio operated by teachers. Every class is led by a certified, community-rooted instructor who brings their full self to the mat. Get to know the people you'll practice with.