Comstock's magazine 1119 - November 2019

n WELLNESS He wanted something different. Something that stirred the heartstrings. So he suggested yoga. And not just any yoga, but stand-up paddleboard yoga, the kind where one could fall into the water. He persuaded the senior executives — mostly yoga virgins, all men in their 50s and 60s — to wake up before dawn, scrap their normal agenda and travel to a lake in Placerville. The air was crisp. They saw bald eagles, deer, fish. The executives paddled onto the lake, and they took deep breaths, led by a Spotted Dog Yoga instructor. “Ev- eryone loved it,” says Walker, his voice full of triumph. Welcome to the world of office yoga, a curious merger of yoga and commerce. It turns out that mindfulness can be lucrative. According to a 2016 survey from Yoga Journal, 36.7 million Americans practice yoga, a nearly 80 percent jump from 2012 (20.4 million), fueling a $16 billion indus- try. Entrepreneurial yogis are now branching out from the studio and into the offices, lobbies and conference rooms of corporate America. Enthusiasts say workplace yoga is more than a fad — it’s a way to boost morale and curb anxiety. “Yoga gives em- ployees a method of dealing with stress,” says Katie Clark, co-owner of Spotted Dog Yoga in Folsom. “When we teach to businesses, we teach things that they can do at the of- fice, at their desk. Tools that are simple and easy.” Even #officeyoga is a thing, with Instagram showing an end- less stream of lithe, blissful workers cheerfully stretch- ing in their cubicles. Are chakras the new spreadsheets? THE OM IS OPTIONAL I’ll cop to my own skepticism. To put it plainly, office yoga feels like a pain in the butt. There’s the hassle of changing clothes, dealing with sweat, the time it takes to shower. And who wants to do a Downward-Facing Dog in front of the boss? To address these kinds of concerns, and in a bit of sav- vy marketing, Sacramento-based yoga instructor Chandra Lovejoy teaches an in-the-office class through Lovejoy Office Yoga she describes as no-change, no-sweat. Sessions are only 30-60 minutes. They are held in a conference room. People can wear their normal work clothes — no mat required, and no awkward poses that highlight parts of one’s body that one does not wish to highlight. “These are modified versions of classic yoga poses,” says Lovejoy. Imagine standing in front of your desk. Put both hands on the table, walk your legs back, keep walking back, stretch, and now you’re in a modified Downward-Facing Dog. Lovejoy says office workers can benefit from a pose like this, because our spines are compressed from all the 66 comstocksmag.com | November 2019 “Yoga gives employees a method of dealing with stress. When we teach to businesses, we teach things that they can do at the office, at their desk. Tools that are simple and easy.” Katie Clark, co-owner, Spotted Dog Yoga desk sitting and laptop hunching. “These poses decompress the spine,” she says. The yoga-at-work trend, like seemingly every workplace trend, first took off in Silicon Valley. In 2011, part-time yoga instructor Maryam Sharifzadeh had a single corporate cli- ent. She wondered if other companies wanted this. “I was like, ‘Hey, maybe this is a thing,’” she says now. She needed a name for the company, and decided on the easy-to-remem- ber Office Yoga. What began as a side hustle now has 20 in- structors in the Bay Area (Office Yoga is headquartered in San Francisco), another 15 instructors nationwide (Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Austin and so on — and she plans to expand to Sacramento), and clients that include McKinsey & Compa- ny, Oracle and the Oakland A’s front-office staff. Lovejoy started as an instructor at Office Yoga in San Francisco. She found the Bay Area to be saturated with work- place yoga. “In the Bay Area, it’s like, ‘Yeah, of course, you don’t have office yoga?’” She taught deep-pocket clients such as Google and AMAG. Two years ago, she moved to Sacra- mento, partly for the same reason many people move from the Bay Area (lower living costs), and partly to grow her own workplace yoga business in a less crowded space. Her clients now include property management firm Dick James & Asso- ciates, Sutter Health, and UC Davis. Like most office yoga programs, Lovejoy focuses on body awareness, redirecting your thoughts to your body, over and

Comstock's magazine 1119 - November 2019 | Page 66