Downtown Camas is bustling on this chilly January Friday evening as shoppers seeking mystery-solving hints pop into dozens of small businesses participating in the Downtown Camas Association’s “CLUE” themed January 2025 First Friday event.
But the mood is much more serene inside one downtown Camas building. Visitors have come to Jacquie Michelle Hill’s LiveWell Camas space on this first Friday of the new year to escape the hustle and bustle happening just outside the yoga and fitness studio’s doors.
They greet Hill inside LiveWell’s plant-filled entryway, then head to a back room where local musicians playing a keyboard and “musical saw” create sounds meant to inspire and uplift community members who have gathered for LiveWell’s “First Friday Unplugged: Somatic Salon,” an event meant to offer, as Hill wrote on LiveWell’s community calendar, “a welcoming, inclusive space for all ages and abilities to connect, create and celebrate.”
The somatic salon encapsulates the type of unique, wellness-focused, easily accessible event Hill had in mind when she first opened her downtown Camas yoga and fitness studio — then known as Body Bliss — in 2019.
“My intention is not just to have a yoga studio, but a space where people can come to find friends and connect to their community,” Hill told The Post-Record in 2019, after moving her studio from Washougal to its current location at 417 N.E. Birch St., in the heart of downtown Camas.