Thrive Embodied Arts in Newton New Jersey is thriving and empowering clients through pole dancing and community

Emily Rose, defines Thrive as a sacred space and healing sanctuary for people longing to reconnect with themselves after the distractions and stresses of everyday life.

Walk down Spring Street in Newton, and you’ll notice a cozy building with warm wood, big windows, gold-painted symbols and star lanterns. You might think it’s a cafe or yoga studio, but the window sign reads: “Thrive — Pole Dance | Zen & Stretch | Healing & Creative Arts.”

This is Thrive Embodied Arts. The owner, Emily Rose, defines Thrive as a sacred space and healing sanctuary for people longing to reconnect with themselves after the distractions and stresses of everyday life. Most, though not all, of her clients are women.

“One of the things I hear the most is that people are finding a way back home to themselves, outside of labels like mom and boss and wife,” Rose said. “It’s really the process of unlearning and unraveling all that they aren’t so that they can now figure out who they are in their femininity. No matter what type of body you have biologically, or how you actually identify.”

In Rose’s view, modern society has us spending too much time in our heads — planning, judging, and struggling to meet the expectations imposed by our roles and responsibilities. But if we define ourselves entirely by our external roles, our obligations become the sole measure of our worth. So not feeling “enough” — motherly enough, loving enough, boss enough — can feel like an existential threat.

Plenty of physical practices can burn calories, but pole dancing’s creativity, adaptability, and expressive potential make it uniquely suitable as a medium for deeper connection.

The answer to this malaise is an embodiment practice, a mindful bringing of attention from purely intellectual engagement with the world to the body. That’s where the physicality of pole dancing comes in. Plenty of physical practices can burn calories, but pole dancing’s creativity, adaptability, and expressive potential make it uniquely suitable as a medium for deeper connection. “We happen to use the pole as a resource,” Rose said. “As a kind of an anchor point to explore … it’s not necessarily an afterthought, but it’s an additive.”

Thrive’s website describes its classes as “soulful,” with emotional processing built into its class offerings. Time to integrate realizations and newly uncovered emotions is vital, Rose said. “When you move your body, you stir (things) around … you start getting real with yourself, and you realize that you’re in a place now where you don’t want to pretend or perform or be small.”

It’s an empowering space, but Rose doesn’t see herself as the critical factor. “I’m not giving power to anyone,” she said. “What I have done is create a space for people to be brave, so that they can honor and tap into their own power.”

Rose dreamt of a space like Thrive for years. After years as an artist and pole dance instructor at residencies around the country, she wanted to bring her vision back to her hometown of Newton.

The building on Spring Street in Newton seemed like the perfect homebase for the healing space she envisioned. She signed the lease on March 1, 2020 and ordered the poles and other supplies she needed. Then the pandemic hit, and those poles lay on the studio floor for the next five months.

With her credit maxed out and in-person restrictions limiting class sizes for months, another business owner might have collapsed into a heap of despair. Not Rose. She saw the experience as a powerful exercise in vulnerability, a quality that she often requests in her clients. And it gave her opportunities to build a tightly knit studio community.

Community is the beating heart of Thrive. When Rose first opened Thrive, not everyone in Newton knew what to make of it. But having grown up in Newton, she knew the city needed a space like this for women. “We need a space where we can feel expansive together,” she said.

Community is the beating heart of Thrive. When Emily Rose first opened Thrive, not everyone in Newton knew what to make of it. But having grown up in Newton, she knew the city needed a space like this for women.

Rose sees Thrive as part of a collective movement within the feminine realm now, away from a scarcity mindset that pits women against each other in zero-sum competitions. Instead, “There’s now an abundance mindset shift,” Rose said. No more Snow White battles over who gets to be the fairest of them all. Instead, it’s: “She is powerful, and so am I. She is beautiful, and so am I.”

Three years after its pandemic opening, Thrive has over 100 members ages 18 to mid-70s, at least seven retreats completed, and a long waiting list for new members.

Has the studio cultivated the powerful inner and communal transformations that Rose envisioned? Absolutely, she said. She lists the changes in her members: radical self-love and self-acceptance, healthy boundaries, self-assurance, a shift in sexuality from dependence on others’ needs and expectations to empowered. It’s “a willingness to take up space with their bodies, their minds and their voices.”

Pretty startling results for a pole dancing studio. But then, as its window suggests, Thrive isn’t just a pole studio. As Thrive member Brie Bednarski puts it: “Thrive Embodied Arts is about the pole as much as yoga is about the mat or meditation is about the cushion. It’s simply the vehicle to a greater embodiment of our soul.”

For more information about Thrive Embodied Arts, visit www.thriveembodiedarts.com.