Hobey Echlin
Yoga Teacher, Long Beach & Hermosa Beach
I discovered Bikram yoga in New York in the months following 9/11. I’d been laid off from my job as a music journalist, and was feeling the general anxiety of that time in NY. My former boss suggested I try Bikram yoga. I’d walked thru the parking lot of Bikram Yoga Chelsea on my way to the gym everyday, so I signed up for an intro week. I remember after the third class the teacher said, “…And if you feel like something’s different when you leave today, it isn’t the world that’s changed— it’s you.” That really resonated with me in those uncertain times. I was finishing writing an auto-biography of the rap group Insane Clown Posse, but within a year I was headed out to LA for Bikram’s Spring 2003 teacher training. “Let no man steal your peace,” said Bikram our first day— and he spent the rest of the nine weeks doing just that with classes twice a day and late-night lectures.
By fall 2003, I’d moved to LA and taught my first class at what is now West Coast Sweat. Within a few years, I was teaching 16 classes a week at five studios around LA, teaching everyone from Raquel Welch to Robert Downey, Jr. I deejayed Bikram’s wife Rajashree’s 40th birthday party at what was then World Headquarters on La Cienega. But more than being a teacher, I was a student, taking advanced class with Bikram’s senior instructor, Emmy Cleaves, three times a week. I was as much a beginner in that class as a beginner in a regular class, and that really led to my empathetic style of teaching. Emmy would explain the postures as much as teach them. As she put it, “The posture is not the object — the body is the object.” She taught me that a teacher could inspire more than demand a student to do their best. She knew when you could do better, like a favorite grandma who’d smile at your B+ report card in a way that let you know she knew you could get an A- if you focused more. And you would.
Doing the advanced class with Emmy (and often Bikram himself) was a masterclass in posture insight and yoga knowledge. Life had its ups and downs— my mother died, I had two kids, one who developed and thankfully outgrew epilepsy, and my father died— all within ten years. I had a knee operation and ultimately my hips replaced just before Covid. Throughout all this, yoga remained a discipline and a source of faith. After twenty years, teaching the yoga is more relevant than ever as I see students showing resilience and growth on and off their mats, and it’s a privilege and honor to be teaching at the same studio that welcomed me two decades ago.