Cesar and Megan Clavijo
Creating a Village for the Community
story by JENNIFER BROWN-CARPENTER photos by PAUL NURNBERG
“We strive to impart a deep and ethical understanding of their responsibility to the world, and empower students to live through love, confidence, patience, and strength.” Those words can be found on the website for Stillness Academy, run by Cesar and Megan Clavijo. They are more than just words on a page, as Cesar and Megan are actively living out love, confidence, patience, and strength in their daily lives. Together since 2014, Cesar and Megan are practicing what they preach each day.
Cesar Clavijo was born on Long Island, New York, but he grew up in Miami, Florida. When he was 17 years old, he joined the Marine Corps. Unlike Beaufort, Miami is not a military town, and Cesar did not know what a Marine was until he was contacted by a recruiter. Cesar asked the recruiter if the Marine Corps had a band (which they do) and learned that they had just introduced the Marine Corps Martial Arts program after the events of September 11, 2001. He decided that since they could provide him access to two of his interests, he would join, serving eleven and a half years on active duty. Beaufort was his last duty station, and he has been here ever since. Cesar had a dream to open Stillness Academy, and as he got to know Beaufort a little better, he felt as if he could fulfill that dream and provide the Lowcountry community with something it did not currently have. That was eleven years ago now.
Megan Clavijo is a born and raised Beaufort native. For most of her life, Megan has been moving her body in some capacity. She started dancing at a very young age, becoming a dance instructor at age 15. Megan discovered yoga when she was around 24 years old, which was a life-changing discovery. She trained to become a yoga instructor and continued that training until she reached the RYT 500 level. Megan was teaching at various studios around the Beaufort area. “I think I’ve always just known that our human bodies are naturally designed to move,” says Megan. “Sound is inspiring to me. Even at a young age, I was called to be a mover.” Moving from dancing to yoga was a natural progression in terms of moving her body.
Similarly to Megan, Cesar would watch how older people would gradually lose their ability to move as freely, or sometimes even to move at all. As a child, Cesar thought that if he just continued to move his body, then he would be able to defy this aging and never need a cane or walker. “But I was not athletic at all, I wasn’t into sports. My thing was music.” During his Marine Corps career, his body, like that of many Marines, was injured and broken down in many ways. He faced chronic pain and other health challenges that ultimately led him to seek medical help. Unfortunately, the help he was seeking was not as helpful as he had hoped. He would find that doctors would simply name his pain, and only offer medication or potential surgeries. This set Cesar on his path to become a Holistic Health Practitioner. Cesar has completed many other certifications and training programs to provide the services that he does at Stillness Academy today, but the main reason why he started down any of these paths was to heal his own body.
Cesar realized that there were not many places that were teaching the things that he thought were important. Martial arts had become very important to him during his time in the Marine Corps, and he believed that if you were going to have a place where you taught people how to defend themselves and potentially hurt others, you should also have the ability to teach them how to help heal both themselves and others. Those are the keys to being happy, healthy, and capable. Cesar saw that those things were not being taught together in traditional martial arts schools, and he also saw that children were becoming more and more unfit and unhealthy at younger ages. “I saw this and I thought, ‘Well, I guess I have to build this space.’” He opened Stillness Academy. “I hoped that people would come, and eleven years later, they are still coming.”
Megan was looking for a more permanent place to teach yoga in 2014 when she found Stillness Academy and met Cesar. Megan was nervous about teaching at Stillness Academy, because she did not know if Cesar would like her or her teaching methods, but they were on the same page when it came to the importance of moving your body. Through teaching at Stillness, Megan and Cesar became good friends. “Then we became roommates,” Megan says. “People on the outside started to notice that we were more than friends and eventually we realized that everyone was right.” Once Cesar and Megan were together, Megan started to take on more responsibility at Stillness Academy, helping with some of the “unseen work.”
Stillness Academy offers one-on-one training and small-group classes to children, adults, and seniors. The classes are typically a mix of yoga, holistic health, martial arts, and athletics. “It is a school for things that they do not teach you in normal schools,” Cesar says. On top of regular classes, Stillness Academy provides therapeutic work, including sound, light, and vibration healing therapies to help provide healing from stress or traumatic events. Megan also provides Thai yoga, which is a type of yoga that utilizes assisted stretching.
Cesar and Megan also offer professional education at Stillness Academy, providing the opportunity to become certified yoga teachers, holistic health practitioners, or martial arts instructors.
It is no secret that Megan and Cesar are having an impact on the community. When asked why this is important, Cesar brings up the quote from author and activist Ayesha Siddiqi: “Be who you needed when you were younger.” Cesar shares, “I derive personal satisfaction from seeing the kinds of people that are coming out of our school and seeing the changes in the students.” In many ways, our culture continues to press toward a place where we are more separated from one another than ever before. In the age of social media, it is so easy to feel isolated from those around you. “There used to be this idea that it takes a village to raise a child, and it is hard for people to feel like they have that close-knit community at times,” Cesar says. In a town like Beaufort, Cesar and Megan feel as if it is incredibly important to foster a sense of community and closeness. “We had some students graduate this year, and one father told me that they feel as if I played as much of a role in how their son has developed as they did. That, to me, is not something I take lightly.”
Megan and Cesar got engaged in January 2020. “We were a COVID couple,” Megan laughs. “The world shut down a few weeks before the wedding we had been planning.” They continued to put their wedding on hold due to other family events that were taking place over the next few years, and finally were married on June 1, 2024. “We were married on our community dock, and it was very sweet, intimate, and special.”
Cesar and Megan hope that in the future there will be more people who will adopt the “Stillness Koncepts” and take them back to their own towns, cities, and communities. As for their own community, they are proud to provide such an authentic experience for everyone that comes through the doors at Stillness Academy. “I want people to know how much care and work we put into what we are providing,” Megan says.
When they are not working or teaching, Cesar and Megan spend their time seeing movies, thrifting, practicing yoga, or relaxing in their sauna. “We love playing games as a family and spend loads of time barefoot in nature.”
Megan says that she and Cesar are seen as yin and yang, and that they compliment each other because of that. While Cesar is more quiet and calm, Megan is more energetic and can be louder. They abide by a code in their home and the academy that brings them closer together and grounds them as partners, parents to their three kids, and lovers. Some of their code involves being honest, respectful, kind, and doing your best, always. Those are words to live and love by.
You can learn more about Stillness Academy on their website: stillness.academy.
