Beneath the Charming Town of Lebanon, Ohio Lies a Testament to Finding Your Bliss

Lebanon, Ohio greets you with red-brick sidewalks, a courthouse at its center, and the state’s oldest hotel, The Golden Lamb Inn. Horse-drawn carriages still circle the square during the holidays, a throwback to its history as a stagecoach town.

At first glance, it feels like a place set apart. It feels familiar, lived-in, and steeped in history. But beneath that surface lies a devotion to community, wellness, and balance that has shaped this land for thousands of years.

Ancient Roots in Wellness

Long before the first settlers laid out Lebanon’s streets in 1802, this land held a sacred purpose. Just beyond town, the Hopewell culture constructed Fort Ancient, one of North America’s most remarkable ceremonial landscapes.

The Hopewell thrived between 100 BCE and 500 CE. They were not a single tribe, but a connected network of communities across the Ohio River Valley. What set them apart was not conquest, but cooperation. They built sprawling earthen walls and geometric enclosures, often aligned to the cycles of the sun and moon, functioning as massive celestial clocks.

Archaeologists believe these sites hosted seasonal rituals and gatherings that brought hundreds, even thousands, together. Wellness was not individual but collective. It was a matter of aligning body, community, and cosmos.

Wellness, for the Hopewell, meant belonging: to the land, to each other, to something larger than oneself.

The Hopewell built their earthworks not for defense, but for alignment. At Fort Ancient, walls curve and open to capture the rising of the sun and moon at key moments in their cycles. These were vast, living calendars—reminders that wellness was inseparable from rhythm, from presence, from belonging to the larger order of nature.

The Adena Mounds and a Corridor of Ceremony

Not far from Lebanon, in Miamisburg, stands another reminder of this ancient continuum, in the form of the Miamisburg Mound. Built by the Adena culture over 2,000 years ago, it rises nearly 70 feet high and is the largest conical burial mound in Ohio. Where the Hopewell created vast ceremonial complexes, the Adena carved meaning into singular forms.

Driving between Miamisburg and Lebanon, you move through a corridor of ceremony. For someone like me, arriving from New York, this landscape is inspiring. I am used to vertical density like glass towers, sidewalks, subway tunnels. Here, the fields widen, the trees open up, and the land itself can breathe.

A Town Built for Belonging

When settlers arrived and founded Lebanon in 1802, they carried forward the same impulse to create a place centered on gathering.

Lebanon quickly became a stagecoach stop between Cincinnati and Columbus. Inns and taverns opened, schools were built, and the courthouse became a civic anchor. The town was designed to be a center, a hub where people came not only to pass through, but to stay, connect, and belong.

At the center of the town is the Golden Lamb Inn, established in 1803. On the surface, it is Ohio’s oldest continually operating hotel, famed for having hosted presidents, authors, and politicians. But to view it only through celebrity is to miss its essence. For over two centuries, the Golden Lamb has functioned as a living hearth. Thousands of community members have gathered here to eat, talk, debate, and share their stories. Its dining rooms and porches have been the backdrop to Lebanon’s unfolding life for more than 200 years. Every generation of the town has circled this hearth.The Golden Lamb reflects what the Hopewell carved into the earth, that wellness and community are bound together.

A Constellation of Wellness in Lebanon

Wellness in Lebanon doesn’t live in one place. It reveals itself in small sanctuaries scattered through the town and its surroundings, spaces you discover as you walk, or hear about from a friend.

On Mulberry Street, the Wellness Lounge feels like a modern healing den. From acupuncture needles placed with precision, the warmth of an infrared sauna, the ritual of a detox foot bath. It is clinical and calming at once, a reminder that restoration can be practical as well as profound.

The Cedar Shack leans into another rhythm: handcrafted soaps, lotions, and teas rooted in homesteading traditions. It smells of herbs and wood, like a small apothecary that connects you directly to the land.

I met a shaman in Miamisburg, who led me through Kambo, the Amazonian healing ritual drawn from the secretion of a toad. Three mornings in a row, the sessions unfolded. Ancient, intense, and raw, they felt like an echo of the ceremonial practices that shaped this Ohio valley long before settlers arrived.

Back in town, I found a different pulse. At BambooMoves Yoga, Lebanon’s undercurrent of presence and connection rose into movement and stillness.

After class, I would walk to the Greenhouse Café for a light lunch—local greens, simple ingredients, food that tasted like nourishment precisely because it wasn’t rushed.

BambooMoves and the Spirit of Presence

The continuity of the land came into focus through BambooMoves Yoga. I had been part of the BambooMoves community for well over a decade before coming to Lebanon, so when I learned that one of its founders, Stephanie Miller-Kopyar, had chosen this town for her newest outpost, I immediately understood why.

Like Lebanon itself, BambooMoves is not about spectacle. It is about presence. It creates space for people to breathe, to move and to restore. It doesn’t impose wellness but rather reveals what is already here.

In this way, BambooMoves fits seamlessly into Lebanon’s hidden agenda. It is not an outsider brand arriving to teach wellness; it is another form of what the town has always practiced.

My Journey to Lebanon

That understanding was not abstract for me. I made the drive from New York to Lebanon with the simple intention of spending a week in a small, historic town. On the surface, that’s exactly what I found in the antique shops, friendly neighbors, and slower rhythm that felt like relief.

In the yoga studio, I found continuity with a practice I had known for years. On the town’s streets and in its cafés, I found strangers who greeted me as though I belonged. In the quiet of a historic inn or after a healing session, I found myself pulled into conversations that reminded me wellness is as much about connection as it is about solitude.

Lebanon didn’t offer me a program or a promise, it offered me presence.

Looking back, it feels inevitable that I would discover this here. The Hopewell built earthworks to align life with the cosmos. The Adena tribes raised their earthen mounds as markers of ritual and remembrance. The settlers built a town to gather people at its center. The Golden Lamb carried forward the tradition of a communal hearth. Modern Lebanon continues it through its wellness spaces, its cafés, its studios, its healers.

BambooMoves, The Wellness Lounge, Cedar Shack, Greenhouse Café and many other local destinations are not separate threads. They are part of the same fabric that stretches across centuries, tying ancient earthworks to present-day sanctuaries.

Living in the Present

In the end, Lebanon gave me more than a week away from the city. It gave me a glimpse of the connection, ancient and modern, cultural and personal. Its beauty may draw visitors in, but its deeper gift is the reminder that wellness and bliss are not destinations to be sought. They are practices. They are ways of being. They are what happens when a community aligns itself through earthworks, inns, cafés, or studios and immerses itself in the idea that life is best lived together, here, now, in the present.