Lara Estrada: Building Community Through Accessible Yoga at Yoga Bliss

‍How did you transition from corporate work to opening a yoga studio?

I had always been active growing up—dance classes, softball for 10 years through high school. In college I studied business at UC Berkeley, but when you're 18, you don't really know what the working world is going to be like. Studying business seemed like a good broad background, but what it led to for me was being in very corporate situations where I sat in a cube all day looking at a screen, entering information and looking at data.

I was working in a tech company in the Bay Area, and I just felt this emptiness of the repetition of work. I was around people that were older than me and I was like, "Oh my God, is this my future? Just sitting in a cube for the rest of my life?"

I didn't feel like that was for me. I had moved back home so I didn't have too many expenses, and my best friend and I decided we were going to save our money and quit our jobs so we could travel for an open-ended amount of time and just take a little break. I took about a little over a year off of working. During that time I did my yoga teacher training, and it was really out of curiosity and a desire to learn more about yoga and the philosophy. I never thought I would even end up teaching, and I never imagined I would ever own a yoga studio.

What did you learn from your extended travels that informed your approach to yoga?

One of the biggest things I learned during that time through extended travel is about minimalism—literally living out of my backpack and getting rid of things on the way. You really don't need much. I carried that into the business model. When it seems overwhelming to start a business, when you think about the bare bones of what is a yoga studio? It's an empty room with floors, and then you fill it with people and it's about the people, it's about the community and the energy that's shared there. It doesn't have to be fancy.

My family, my parents were born and raised in the Philippines, and they always made it a point for us to visit. There's a lot of poverty there, but they wanted us to see that life is so different from here. Culture is different, people are different. When we would meet other Americans, it was a similar story—we are so burned out of our corporate life and the hustle. Whereas other people travel all the time and it's a part of their life, things are more leisurely. Trying to carry that warmth and kindness into the community and keeping that really humble perspective.

How do you address the perception that yoga is only for certain types of people?

When you look at the yoga sutras, the physical part of yoga is so small. There's so many other aspects to yoga, and unfortunately that's the most focused on part here. There's a give and take because that's what everyone's expecting—they're wanting a physical workout—but then there's people who are curious for more.

You can use the physical practice as a touchpoint to other aspects of meditation, concentration, and getting deeper into the practice. Almost all of the classes are a physical yoga practice because that's supply and demand, but in what I share and what I try to have other teachers share are the things that are beyond just the physical. I've tried to do different offerings that are more on the gentle side, like restorative practice, yoga nidra. For a while we did meditation classes, just so people get a taste of different things other than "I'm going to go to yoga to sweat and work out and be skinny."

What does the line "the normal mind is the unconscious mind" mean to you?

We have so much programming. Our thoughts that we have, they're often imprinted from other things that have happened, things that people have told us. Those things are unconscious in the sense that we didn't necessarily decide them—they've just been put there. So there's that part that we don't even think about, but then that becomes what we're thinking about all the time.

How has this work transformed you and your community?

It's really different for different people. It can be as simple as people telling me, "I sleep so well after taking this class. I usually have trouble sleeping." That can be life changing for someone. There's someone who came to class nearly every day for months and lost 40 pounds and completely turned around their health. There's people who have met friends that have been there for them through thick and thin from stepping into the studio.

There's one person who shared that they're diagnosed bipolar and that discovering yoga and practicing yoga with us was better than any medication. I'm not a doctor, so I'm not saying don't take medication, but practicing yoga, breathing, being present worked better than medication for them.

For me, I feel like I've gained a lot of community. I feel like a lot of people that have come to class, other teachers that I've worked with, people who have gone through our trainings and workshops—they've become dear friends of mine and have helped to support the business. It supports me as well in feeling that sense of community. I didn't grow up here in LA—I moved here in 2010 and didn't know that many people. When I got more involved in the yoga community, that's where I felt more like this was home.

What yoga principles do you find most applicable to everyday life?

I would have to go back to the yoga sutras and one of the definitions of yoga being that yoga is the calming of the fluctuations of the mind. Just how much we can all benefit from that. The way that our mind can really make us go crazy if you ever sit there and try to count your thoughts or listen to your thoughts and the ways that they spiral. To have this practice of yoga to bring us back to center, to bring us more to the present moment, and in the present moment, then really realizing what's important and what's not, what's real and what's not, and what's of value and what's not. To have that discernment through presence, I feel like that's a very valuable gift.

Where do you see yourself and the studio in the next five to ten years?

That's really hard to say because after the pandemic, I don't know anymore. I had actually expanded to a second location in 2019, months before everything shut down. I ended up having to let go of that because there's no way I could have kept that going while yoga studios weren't allowed to operate for like a year or more.

Right now I'm still in a phase of rebuilding. So many people have moved and changed during the time that we were closed. I feel like there's things that I was doing before that I had stopped doing through the pandemic, so just getting back to normal and then really being open to see what's next. This year we're planning to finally bring back our teacher training program and getting back to retreats. I always leave room for miracles and things to just happen unexpectedly as well.

‍