Spreading the Spirit
Estro is on the Bhakti path and India is her favorite place to travel, study spirituality and visit schools to remind kids we are spirit souls living inside material bodies and one way to connect to our highest power is through roller skating.
Let her tell you all about this trip to India!
The only place I have ever traveled to and NOT brought my skates, is India. I've been twice and extended my last stay to travel alone. Ever since I was a foreign exchange student in high school, I've always preferred attempting to enculturate to 'visiting" and India is a hard place to find a tourist trap.
Traditional vacations leave me feeling like a pawn in consumerism and returning 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 inspired, filled with appreciation and ready to share. I am so grateful for the roller skating community who has connected me to so many different cultures and places, & without skating, I rely on faith that its all going to be okay, no matter where I am in the world.. with or without wheels.
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,... "Yah right! 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 hard stuff with my body while balancing partying- until I started filming for this part. 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 I 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 also the same time this lady Dharma Shakti was teaching free yoga on the bluff. I'd always remembered she was doing her thing right next to me doin mine, so I started there and to my shocking surprise, all soreness went away after skating- 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 is a structured exploration of the body’s possible relationships to gravity, breath, and attention. It is a series 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 before getting 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.
I found that even though there were so many people there sharing resources, they seemed to be the most cheerful people. While on tour we visited many scared temples, caves, took all different types of yoga classes, including laughing yoga- my favorite. We were taught Vedic wisdom and sang chants while playing music for hours every day. While there I visited an Ayurvedic doctor who gave me a prescription to meditate for 20 minutes daily - and that really changed my life.
Leaving that first trip, I felt so fully inspired I wanted to keep its energy so I would attend every Kirtan I could find and meditate daily for 2 years until I went back. On that first trip I met a business woman who broke the Guinness Book of World Records for starting the most amount of businesses in India and she invited me to come back to visit the schools that she operated.
I returned to India in October '25 after experiencing three pretty gnarly medical issues that kept me off my skates. While street skating in NYC I cut open my knee and suffered a bad infection that kept me off my skates for 2 months in winter of 23 and in '24 and '25 I had two miscarriages, one was caused by a ruptured ovarian cyst. Being off skates and healing my body encouraged me to reevaluate what's important to me in life and I knew it was time to connect to soul.
This time I followed New York based Ray Cappo, Raguhunath's
group from the East Coast to India. I thought the trip would be more asana based, but it was a full Bhakti immersion of Kirtan (singing, dancing, playing instruments together) Wisdom talks and association with Bhakti devotees at all different temples and other historical dojos throughout Northern India. Without skates, and also healing from what I was, I made great friends with a child on our trip, Tarun and often checked out to play soccer or juggle with him.
Before the trip, I was excited to get home to go to a Jack Ass art show that my friend Marc invited me to attend but while in India I met a mystic at a jewelry shop who encouraged me to follow my heart and stay in India longer to explore the country on my own. I had been practicing Shaktipat meditation for a couple of years and there was a small village in Adivarapupeta where Shivabalayogi's sat for twelve years in tapas and where his body is buried in Samadhi.
The village was very small and magical. All of the families tended to the rice fields and made Saree's on underground looms at the entrances of all of the homes. I stayed in a very clean, simple ashram room, attended daily aarti's and ate delicious homemade food with no utensils on top of large banana leaves. I was missing my little friend so when I asked if there were any children there, they invited all of the children from the village to come play. I taught them some games like freeze tag and add a trick as well as how to express some feelings in English and Spanish. I tricked them into learning handstands and spun them around, dancing and laughing lots.
After my solo adventure I returned to New Delhi and hit up my business friend with the schools. She prepared a couple school assembly's for me to visit and inspire the children to follow their dreams. I told them all about myself while referencing all the famous quotes from great minds that kept me motivated to skate and contribute to the skating industry. After the school assembly they took me to Physical Education class where I was really blown away.
They had roller skating as a main activity in their Gym Class! Everyone had skates, they even had skates for me! They performed a 30 min long routine demonstrating their talents in all the ways to do it; racing, dancing, tricking, couple skating, etc. Then I taught them 3 skills and demonstrating my own talents. After we wrapped, I was rushed to the next school to do it all again and it turned out to be one of the very best and most memorable days of my life. 
When the trip came to a close, I promised myself I was going to stay on this high flying disk of Bhakti devotional exploration. I followed my friend Scott to Philadelphia and visited the Bhakti Centers & Temple there and in NYC. I participated in opportunities for Seva (devotion to Krishna through service) by making food for the houseless that the devotees would distribute on the weekends.
After the holidays I found the Bhakti SF center
and ever since Ive been visiting the ashram on the weekends for Kirtan and Seva, distributing meals to the houseless on Mission.
One day I hope to take a grip of devoted roller skaters there to enjoy the Durga and Kali festivals. Use the Contact page if you're interested in going!
