My journey into the world of yoga started in the early 90’s here in Los Angeles. Baron Baptiste had classes out of Karen Voigt’s studio on La Cienega and a friend dragged me to a class. I don’t remember much about the class except that I knew it wasn’t for me. It would take a few more classes from a few different teachers for it to catch on.
My body was injured from years of weightlifting and sports. I had already undergone shoulder surgery from a torn rotator cuff muscle. I was tight as a board and not sold on this yoga thing. I thought that I was strong, but yoga strong was something I had no idea about. I thought, like most people, that yoga was about being flexible.
Then, I met my first teacher who made me laugh. He was from the Kundalini lineage but was very interested in combining more traditional hatha yoga into his teachings. I studied with him for a few years before deciding to try teaching. My first official paying teaching job came in 1997 at the then-brand-new Crunch Fitness on Sunset and Crescent Heights in West Hollywood. It was a strange conflagration of worlds. We were practicing in a giant room with glass walls and one mirrored one. It was basically a fish bowl! We would also be trying to focus on our breath while a spinning class with Madonna blasted outside the bowl. Savasana was pretty interesting then.
Soon, however my classes were growing beyond capacity. 90+ students we packing in on a regular basis and I was getting attention from the owners. They flew out from NY to have a meeting with some of us to discuss the popularity of the yoga classes. I had some really good ideas waiting for them. We sat and I presented them with an idea to open an annex called “Crunch Wellness”. There was vacancy in that center back then and I knew that the yoga had to move out of the gym atmosphere for it to be taken seriously. I offered to set up the program and manage and teach. They declined.
I knew that I had a better opportunity out there. I wasn’t get paid enough and there weren’t any more teaching slots to be had. So I decided I was going to rent some space locally and teach my own public classes on the side. Finding the space was easy. We had already been practicing and studying in this small space on the corner of Santa Monica Blvd and Fairfax in West Hollywood. I approached the owner of the space and asked if I could rent some time. I started with 2 classes a week. It was all donation back then. I just wanted to teach. I wanted to create a space that was just for yoga. I remember my first class only one student showed up! I thought to myself “oh this isn’t going to work out”. I was wondering if I had made a mistake.
The second class had a few more people in it. Then a few more. Soon I needed to add 2 more classes. Then a Sunday class. In the span of a few months I had 5 classes going and I wanted more. This is when the idea really hit me that this could be an actual yoga studio. Why not me? Why not now? There wasn’t anything around at that time in mid city. Center for Yoga on Larchmont and Yoga Works on the westside were the biggest studios and they were just too far for people to commit to a regular practice. I think it was the right place/right time scenario. I decided to go forward with plans.
I met a fellow yogi at the time who was doing the same thing I was, renting space out of the back of a boxing gym on Beverly. I would take her classes and she, mine. We talked about similar ideas and plans and it was a good match. We both had our ideas on what to call this studio and we ended up agreeing to call it City Yoga. My idea for the name actually came to me in mediation one morning. The blend of spiritual practice and mundane life, together. That notion that anything you were looking for was already inside you. I thought that if you can’t find your peace in one the biggest and busiest cities in the world, then you can’t find it. and City Yoga was born.
We opened in June of 1999. We were on fire. The talk of the town. We had a mix of great teachers from different styles of yoga. We ran lean and made a name for ourselves in a very short period of time. Just before we opened our doors I had met and began studying with my next teacher. His name as John Friend. I had never been inspired as much as I was with him. I really connected to his teaching style and instruction. He broke things down and made them accessible. We talked history and philosophy and using yoga as therapy. I hadn’t heard it like this before. I was all in.
I took my first teacher training with him in 1998 and I knew from then on that this was the style of yoga I wanted to teach. He called it Anusara Yoga. Anusara means to be in the flow. The idea was simple, combine good solid yoga alignment principles (from the Iyengar tradition) with an uplifting philosophy to guide it. It was groundbreaking. Everyone else was teaching what was taught to them. A lot of Iyengar, Ashtanga, Bikram and Kundalini but those styles weren’t inspiring. In fact, they could be downright deflating. This was different.
I studied with him as much as I could as he lived in Texas and was teaching around the country. I took more trainings and workshops with him and finally got certified in 2002. We decided that City Yoga was only going to teach Anusara Yoga. By then all of our teachers needed training and we started trainings ourselves. We were the first studio in California to do so. We were growing faster than we could keep up. Later that year we opened another floor of our studio and made the original studio one huge open space. Its still the most beautiful space I have ever taught in anywhere in the world.