About Namasteph
My name is Stephanie, and I am a student of yoga. I’m not naturally flexible, I cannot bend my legs behind my back and up over my shoulders, and you won’t see me gracing the cover of a yoga magazine anytime soon.
I started yoga in the 1990s to help with my chronic fatigue syndrome. Mostly, I did it at home with a few beginner-level videos. In 1995, I lived in Santa Monica for a year, a few blocks from Santa Monica Yoga. I mostly took the gentle classes there. Regular hatha yoga was extremely strenuous for me (I had been on disability in 2003).
After I moved from that neighborhood, I stopped going to yoga classes and eventually life took me into another direction (surfing). Yoga, also, seemed to get trendy and commercial and expensive. (This is no criticism of Santa Monica Yoga, but I have taken to calling YogaWorks the “Starbucks of Yoga.” $18 for one yoga class!! Are you kidding me? I’ll buy a new DVD each week for that price!)
Even though I still tried to practice somewhat at home, I wasn’t very consistent. The slicker yoga seemed to get, the less interested I was in returning to it.
So I wouldn’t consider myself as having seriously practiced yoga ever, really. I took a few yoga classes at my gym, but as you can guess those usually suck. I didn’t actually start a serious yoga practice until November of 2006 when I found myself quite accidentally at the Sivananda Yoga Center, a non-profit classical yoga studio in Marina del Rey. There, I found a spiritual environment where yoga was taught as a life practice and not just a trendy exercise for Brentwood yuppies. (Not to mention, Sivananda classes are ridiculously affordable.)
Sivananda comes from a traditional guru paradigm, and followers often go to live at the ashram where they change their name and sometimes even renounce possessions to volunteer to teach yoga to others. While I respect this path, I am not that “hardcore” into the entire yoga lifestyle (for example, I’m not a vegetarian nor do I plan to become one). I have found, however, a greater peace of mind and sense of well-being from following a more traditional, spiritual-flavored yoga practice.
In August of 2007, I started going to Golden Bridge Yoga on the recommendation of a friend. This is the world-famous yoga “village” run by Gurmukh, and is a hub for Kundalini Yoga in Los Angeles. I find that Kundalini Yoga is wonderful for moving energy and releasing old emotional blocks. I also happen to dig the gong…yeahhh!
Recently I finished my 200-hour yoga teacher training, which was a mix of Hatha and Kundalini Yoga. I took teacher training as a way to deepen my yoga practice as well as learn more about healing through physical movement. I am now teaching classes and privates in West Los Angeles, with an emphasis on assisting beginners and people with physical limitations. Please see my Yoga Reiki website for more information.