Zoom in on Chicago’s Gold Coast Galleria skyscraper at sunset and you might see a group of yogis practicing headstands on the rooftop before launching into a euphoric dance lit by golden hour rays.
You won’t hear meditative gongs or ambient acoustic guitars on this playlist, however. Yoga instructor and DJ Alissa Seymoure puts her own twist on electronic dance music, sprinkled with bright tropical riffs and sparkly chords.
Seymoure is just one of a number of Eventbrite creators fusing yoga with their own interests and perspectives to offer sell-out classes. And it’s no surprise really, yoga has been growing steadily in popularity for years with no signs of slowing down.
The number of Americans doing yoga rose from around 21 million to 34 million between 2010 to 2021. An Eventbrite survey found that almost a quarter of respondents prefer to practice two to three times a week and it’s the most Googled fitness class in California. For Yoga Awareness Month, we’re highlighting some of the creators successfully making yoga their own.
Alissa Seymoure, Deep House Yoga
Seymoure’s been fusing her love of house music with yoga for over a decade. She first got hooked on yoga in college after finding it improved her mental health. Although she enjoyed the classes, she didn’t connect with the mellow music most instructors played and sometimes struggled with boredom during practice.
When she later began DJing, Seymoure saw an opportunity. “I thought there was room to bring the music I loved to perform on dance floors to the yoga space, where the asanas could complement the music,” she says.
Her live DJ vinyasa flow classes offer a place for attendees, especially women, to let loose to electronic music safely, without the hard-partying atmosphere that dominates the club scene.
“It’s hard to not care what other people are thinking of you if you’re at a festival where there’s a bunch of drunk men around,” she says. “Women are looking for spaces to be with each other and empower each other.”
Having the right soundtrack enhances the healing that yoga offers, says Seymoure. Yoga offers a broad range of health benefits, from lowering blood pressure to boosting mindfulness, and there’s strong evidence to suggest music also has therapeutic power. “I use yoga and music together as medicine,” she says. Don’t be fooled by the house music label. Her playlists lean towards tunes that uplift attendees’ energy rather than thumping beats—think Ibiza’s Café del Mar, rather than Berlin’s Berghain.
Growing her business has required perseverance. At one point, she lived with six roommates and owned a single pair of yoga pants that she washed every day. Now, she’s running her packed sunset skyline sessions as well as international yoga retreats, including an upcoming one in Tulum, Mexico.
She credits Eventbrite with helping to bring in customers and enhance her profile. Her top tip for up-and-coming creators? Make use of Eventbrite’s recurring event series option.
“When people come to me for advice, I always tell them to post an event series on Eventbrite. When you’re sharing that same link for six months at a time, the algorithm seems to notice and it really drives traffic. It just works so much better than anything else,” she says.
Shakira Scott, Your Local Yoga Dealer
Shakira Scott taught her first yoga class on the fly, after an instructor no-showed.
While working a stressful job in the fashion industry in Los Angeles, she’d begun taking yoga classes at the Agape International Spiritual Center in Culver City to help relax and loosen her body. Although she’d had years of experience as a dancer, she was surprised at how powerful yoga was. “I started to feel amazing. I felt like I was moving muscles in my body that I hadn’t moved in years—or maybe ever,” she says.
One day, however, the usual instructor didn’t show up for class. “It was me and seven people just sitting there. The class elected me to be the teacher. I was like: ‘I don’t even know what to say!’” she remembers. Coincidentally, she’d also just had a dream where someone asked if she was a yoga teacher.
It was all beginning to seem like a sign from the universe, but Scott was still turned off by the lack of diversity she’d experienced in yoga classes. “I didn’t see women that looked like me: Black, muscular, tattooed,” she says.
Scott started digging a little into yoga’s history and roots from India. She was surprised to discover historical images of Indian men practicing asana. Uncovering the sport’s origins helped her feel ready to take her practice to the next level, motivated to demonstrate that yoga could be for all. She completed teacher training in 2015 in Oakland, CA and has been selling tickets on Eventbrite since 2016. In 2018 she launched Black to Yoga, which employs Black yoga teachers, and uses Eventbrite to sell out monthly yoga classes in downtown Oakland.
In addition to classes, Scott also offers one-on-one coaching sessions with clients, including professional football players. Scott’s focus is on empowering her students. “My style of teaching has a coaching aspect to it. I’m a fan of teaching people how to do something and then encouraging them to do it even when I’m not around,” she says. She’s also passionate about using everyday language in the studio, avoiding metaphors in favor of detailed explanation of a pose.
There’s definitely a sense of mission to her work: “Black and brown people die from things every year that yoga can help cure, like high blood pressure and diabetes,” she says. “My main goal is to get people of color to feel in tune with themselves so they can feel when something isn’t right and when they need to adjust their bodies.”
Marquita René Davis, Black Velveteen Yoga
Some people tackled puzzles during the COVID-19 pandemic, while others baked bread. Marquita René Davis of Los Angeles, CA, took on a more robust challenge: she trained as a yoga instructor.
Davis had already been a yoga enthusiast long before lockdown. She first started in college, but it was while working a physically demanding job with LA Fashion Week that she became hooked. In addition to improving her physical health, it also gave her a chance to disconnect. “You go in, lay on the mat, turn off your phone, and check out. You leave the outside world and you wind up doing great things with your body,” she says.
When the pandemic essentially shut down in-person events like LAFW, Davis saw a chance to switch careers. With a lot of time on her hands, she was able to finish her training at an accelerated pace and start offering virtual classes. Once lockdowns eased, she moved to in-person events and leaned on Eventbrite to help her get business booming.
Davis recently started offering regular yoga + sound bath classes, where attendees practice in a heated Vinyasa class accompanied by quartz crystal sound bowls tuned to 432 hz—a frequency described as “Earth’s heartbeat”.
She usually hosts the event outdoors but, with Los Angeles experiencing unpredictable weather this summer, she’s been grateful for the Eventbrite feature which lets her quickly alert attendees if she has to reschedule.
Davis teaches regularly at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and at L.A. Care Health Community Resource Centers. This has given her a first-hand look at how yoga can empower all ages. At UCLA, her classes are filled with students in their late teens and early twenties. At L.A. Care, her pupils are usually grandmothers and grandfathers, like 75 year-old Ramon who attends twice a week.
“I see young people develop and build their confidence and awareness of their body, then I see people at a later time in life get confidence again because they’re feeling stronger, their breathing is healthier and they can be more active in their daily life,” she says. “I get to experience both sides.”
