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GREENSBORO — Sometimes, it becomes clear the universe is trying to tell you something.

Andrea Dyer was a top project manager at American Express when the events of her life led her to something her heart already yearned to do — open her own yoga studio.

“I had gotten deeply into yoga and felt the need to do something with that,” she says. “I had a two-year plan. But the courage to take that leap has to be there.”

Dyer had built up a client base teaching yoga over the years at Fitness Today, Yoga Cafe and even in her own backyard.

A friend, inspired by Dyer’s passion, chose opening a yoga studio as a business case study for her MBA program at UNCG.

Dyer knew she needed a good location, and her husband found one that was ideal.

She figured she needed $15,000 to get started. That was the exact amount of her last bonus at American Express.

But she was probably a year away from executing her plan when she was unexpectedly laid off from American Express. She had completed a key yoga certification the day before.

“We believe things happen for a reason,” says husband Jon Dyer. And everything that happened pointed in this one direction.

Still, getting laid off didn’t go down easy. As a top-rated employee, Dyer didn’t expect to be let go. But her whole department, and others across the country, were eliminated as the company concentrated those functions in New York and Florida.

“You go through a whole range of emotions,” she says. “Anger, grief. It’s really the whole Kubler-Ross thing. I had to drive by there every day, and it stung for a while.”

But unlike many of her co-workers, Dyer already had a plan for her future. The MBA project confirmed that the market for yoga classes was not fully tapped and provided her with invaluable demographic information on possible locations. When her husband showed her the space in the shopping center anchored by Earth Fare, it all fell into place.

“When we saw this space, it started manifesting as a reality,” Dyer says.

She used her final days at American Express to create marketing materials and contact her core clients. Some of her co-workers who also were laid off helped her paint the studio.

She opened Mind/Body/Fitness Yoga in April 2009 and made the rent in her first month out. She ended her first year in business with $80,000 in receipts — just as the MBA case study by her former boss, Mary Justice, had predicted she would.

“I had gone to a couple of her classes, and I could see she had a real talent,” says Justice, who is now senior manager for learning networks at American Express. “She really puts herself into everything she does.”

Dyer admits she is a classic Type A personality, which is one of the things that led her back to yoga in the mid-1990s.

She took her first yoga class in college in 1982, primarily to rehabilitate her body from dance injuries. An English major with a minor in dance, she ended up working for a credit card company in customer service.

When she relocated to Greensboro, it was a logical step to apply at American Express. She worked there for 20 years, moving from customer service to training to project management. She was very good — and very driven.

“She was on top of everything, and if things weren’t 100 percent, if people weren’t doing their jobs, it drove her crazy,” Justice says. “It was always so funny for me to see her at work and then see her teaching yoga. She is a different person in that studio and that environment.”

Yoga helped keep her life in balance when she worked at American Express.

“She’d rush home to teach after working a full day at the office,” says Andrea Moscatelli, who has taken yoga classes with Dyer since 2000. “She’s very brave to open her own business — and a business which is so totally different from corporate America. She went with her dream, and that’s a scary thing to do.”

Moscatelli attends Dyer’s Ashtanga yoga class on Thursdays and the free class Dyer offers on Mondays for people who are unemployed. It’s been a feature of the studio since it opened.

“I watched my co-workers go through the shock of getting laid off, and there’s not a lot of help on an emotional level for people going through that,” Dyer says.

It helps tremendously to have a place to go on Mondays, when everyone else is going to work, and just get centered for the week, Moscatelli says. Laid off from the airline industry, she now is confronting the question that faces so many unemployed people.

“Do I go with what I’ve always done, or do I do what I want to do?” Moscatelli says.

Yoga is all about listening to what’s going on inside, Dyer says.

“What’s your heart’s deepest desire? You really need to think about what you want to spend your time doing. But it’s also about survival. If your passion is something that costs money instead of something you can use to make money, you may need to do something else.”

Passion alone won’t drive most businesses, says Jon Dyer, but yoga may really be the exception.

“In my opinion, what sets yoga studios apart is the teachers,” he says. “I just knew it would work, knowing her passion and knowing how she loves to do it.”

But she is also a businesswoman, thankful for all she learned at American Express. She watches income and expenses with a sharp eye.

“She’s still very focused, very driven,” her husband says. “I think to have your own business, you have to have that personality.”

The scary part, Andrea Dyer says, is knowing that she is the business. It’s harder to go on vacation, take time off. And what if something happens to her?

“But it’s probably healthy to have that fear,” she says. “You don’t take things for granted so much when you’re working for yourself.”

Dyer is happy with the niche her studio occupies. It’s a smaller studio with smaller classes and more intimate instruction.

Incremental growth suits her just fine. This year, she’s adding teacher training to see where that goes.

“It’s not all about the money,” she says. “Yoga has always been there in my life. It’s about sharing the light of yoga.”

Contact Susan Ladd at 373-7006 or susan.ladd@news-record.com