Spreading the Spirit 

The only place I have ever traveled to and NOT brought my skates, is India. I've been twice and extended my stay last trip to travel alone. Ever since I was a foreign exchange student in high school, I've always preferred attempting to enculturate than the tourist trap experience and India is a hard place to find a tourist trap. 

I find it sad to save money to be tourist trapped and return home drained. When you find a place that you can share your culture and ideas, experience a place and people so different than you, I generally find that I return home actually inspired, filled with appreciation and ready to share. 

I started doing yoga while I was filming my first street part, a Bones edit that went viral about 13 years ago. The filmer, Vern Laird was fed up after blocking off weekends for me to film and suggested I start eating better (like him, a vegan) and doing yoga, "like the old guys I film, do." 

My initial thought was,... "Pro-skaters do Yoga?!?" but I could tell he was dead serious and about to drop me if I didn't start showing up on Sundays. Ngl, I always took advantage of how much I was able to do cool stuff with my body while balancing partying. Street skating was so tough that after a full day of filming Saturday, I would wake up on Sundays feeling like an actual block of concrete and couldn't get out of bed. 

The same year I started teaching free skate lessons at the bottom of the Junipero Hill in LBC, was the same year this lady Dharma Shakti was teaching free yoga on the bluff. I'd always remembered, so I started there and to my shocking surprise, all soreness has gone away ever since I found asana practice from yoga. Yoga is a term that in my opinion has been manipulated to market to consuming, fitness focused Americans. Though, there is a whole universe to yoga and just a galaxy that exists in postures. 

Asana a structured exploration of the body’s possible relationships to gravity, breath, and attention. In my humble interpretation, its a bunch of movements to prepare you to practice traveling to the other galaxies that 'Yoga" has to offer, which are Devotion, Wisdom, Action and Meditation. 

I learned that Dharma is a devotee, practicing Bhakti yoga. I loved the free lessons on the Bluff and it was my roller derby playing accountant that told me about a new client of hers that opened a Heated yoga studio, which was also Bhakti/Devotional based. I started going there every day in the studio because it was easier to focus in a quiet room and the heat helped me go deeper, its like stretching after a bath rather than having to get warm and to work. The teachers there were telling stories about a trip to India they took and being an avid world traveler on roller skates, a trip to India just for 'Yoga' sparked my interest. Though, there was something about traveling there with Dharma that felt more soul connected, so I did.