In a perfect world, angels are given the same spotlight as celebrities. Aiming to build a more sustainable world, the Yoga Journey Spotlight is born. Through storytelling and shared practice, the yogis and yoginis in my community reveal pieces of their yoga journeys.
The first person I had to interview: Robin. Although I’ve known Robin for just six months, we connected immediately. During a turbulent transition from a full-time job in online education in February of this year, I was welcomed to the magical space of Peace Yoga Gallery where I met Robin.
Between yoga classes, Robin & I learned a lot from each other. I shared with her teaching tips and yoga wisdom. Robin shared with me her green thumb and nutritional knowledge. Finding comfort in her soft voice, gentle flow and wisdom beyond her years, Robin quickly became a dear friend. While Robin’s voice may be soft, she’s far from demure - I learned a lot about the grace of strength.
As grounded as the plants she cares for, Robin’s classes offer a smooth, slow, yin flow. This is quite the balance to my active, athletic lifestyle -, slowing down is one of my biggest challenges, and is a large part of why I’m injured so often. I welcome the calm and stillness I know I’ll find in Robin’s classes.
Last week I had the great fortune to interview Robin after a beautiful yoga flow at Echo Park. Here’s what she had to say about her yoga journey:
Today joining me is Robin at Echo Park. I”m your host Jackie, and I look forward to sharing with you what I learned from Robin about her yoga journey. We’ll flow like water, ground like trees, and shine in the sun.
Echo Park is my favorite place to practice yoga because it has all the elements that bring me peace, which is water, animals, lots of wind, lots of green trees, shade - all those things calm me and center me.
The things that led me to yoga is just having a rough childhood and me wanting to shed all that trauma into my new phase of life. So, I started yoga at 19 and I wanted my adulthood to be more joyful, I wanted to have more control.
So, yoga kind of found me. I remember practicing young, having a DVD around 16, one time, but I was consistent around age 19 when I found my studio.
My favorite yoga pose is tree pose. Matter of fact, when I used to wash dishes, I used to call it flamingo style before I knew it was called tree.
The most challenging pose for me is dancer. Ironically, it’s one of my favorites. When I’m flexible, that’s how I know I’m well balanced.
My biggest challenge is the reason why I started, actually: hard memories that come up. Because your body holds on to these stressful memories in the form of tension through back pain, shoulder pain, neck pain, stuff like that. And if you don’t take care of it, it’ll turn into bigger problems later on.
So my biggest challenge is staying consistent with it for the sanity. Just me keeping clarity in my mind.