At this point in time where our community’s wellness is more important than ever, Noozhawk is proud to launch our NEW Holistic Health and Wellness Guide!
Noozhawk talked with a number of local business owners and wellness practitioners in Santa Barbara County to help inform our readers on how they can best improve their overall wellness.
In this interview, Noozhawk sat down with Barbara Hirsch, owner of Santa Barbara Yoga Center to discuss her practice.
Santa Barbara Yoga Center
Question: What is the name of your business or practice?
Answer: Santa Barbara Yoga Center
Q: Can you describe what services or products your business or practice offers?
A: Yoga classes, workshops and trainings. Our retail area offers yoga blankets, bolsters and other props, and environmentally sound yoga clothing. Healing practitioners rent spaces in our building. We offer personal yoga retreats.
Q: How does your business or practice connect with health and wellness?
A: The Santa Barbara Yoga Center is a mindful, community-based business operated in alignment with the tenets of yoga philosophy. We are passionate about consistently providing excellent teaching, accessible classes, and a Yoga Home that welcomes all, body, mind and spirit. We offer Iyengar, Yin, Vinyasa, Prenatal, Kundalini, and Gentle yoga classes and private instruction also available.
Q: What makes your business or practice unique?
A: • We have highly qualified teachers, many of whom have a strong background in therapeutic yoga. Our teachers have been trained in the classical traditions and can adapt to the needs of individual students. Wem offer classes that range from gentle to advanced. We also offer accessible classes for those with chronic medical conditions.
• Our yoga center has been in Santa Barbara for nearly 30 years and is known for its historic building and beautiful studios including a fully equipped Iyengar studio.
• We offer individual yoga retreats that allow one to escape from the busy world to a quiet, fully furnished loft apartment and unlimited yoga classes.
Q: How do you keep connected with the community and your patrons?
A: We email weekly newsletters and daily schedules to subscribers. Through these newsletters and social media, students read about teachers, classes, workshops, teacher trainings, special studies. We also hold public events such as book signings and kirtan. Our students and staff have formed friendships with each other. We enjoy a very thoughtful, compassionate, and supportive community.
Q: What kind of training, education, or certifications do you hold?
A: We have yoga teacher trainings for teachers to get their Yoga Alliance 200 or 300 hour certification. We hold workshops that cover a wide range of education from healing shoulders to the health of the pelvic floor to meditation and pranayama.
Q: How does your business or practice help your patrons?
A: Many people start yoga classes with us to help improve their balance, strength, flexibility, or to take care of an injury. All of our classes address these issues and students gain balance and strength they never had before. But, what really keeps people returning is the effect yoga has on their emotions, mind, and outlook. No matter the age, gender, or capability, students receive attentive care for everything from their back pain to anxiety. Our building also houses healing practitioners in acupuncture, massage and an infrared sauna!
Q: Are your services covered by insurance?
A: No.
Q: If you do not accept insurance, do you offer any payment plans or any financing options?
A: We offer scholarships.
Q: How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected your business or practice?
A: During the pandemic, we had to close our physical building but we offered our yoga classes live streamed which helped our students be healthy and calm. Our income suffered but we tried to invent new ways of reaching out. We were pleased to find that non-local students began to attend live stream classes, too. Our teachers recorded their live stream classes so students could take recorded classes. Now, we are reopening with reduced capacity and we are hopeful that next year we will be able to operate like we did before the pandemic.
Q: Is there anything you would like to tell our readers that was not mentioned above?
A: If you have been curious about yoga, it is good to know that there are many styles, from the most athletic, to practices that are gentle, restorative and meditative, with so many kinds in between! Please explore different classes, different teachers.
After trying a few classes 17 years ago, it became clear to me how beneficial the practice was to my mind, body and spirit, and that I would never give it up.
Click here to learn more information about Santa Barbara Yoga Center!