Svastha Yoga Wellness and Community Hub Opens its Doors

A new yoga studio on Webster and Pacific is currently in its soft opening and will host its Grand Opening on September 14 from 9 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. The opening party will offer music, food, raffles, and complimentary services including yoga, reiki mini sessions, chair massage mini sessions, sauna blanket sessions, and a relaxing yoga session with a sound bath to close the day.

Owner and founder Tatiana Stollman hopes that Svastha Yoga Wellness and Community Hub will be more than just a place to practice yoga. She’s envisioning a place for friends to gather and enjoy each other’s company. “Svastha” is a Sanskrit word for health, used to refer to a state where body, mind, and soul are in equilibrium. That’s a concept Stollman, who struggled to balance her family and work life for many years, understands very well.

Born in Costa Rica, Stollman was first introduced to yoga when she was a college student in the 1990s, “before studios, before magazines, before all that,” Stollman said. “I read a little description, and I’m like ‘Oh, that sounds interesting.’ I had no idea what yoga was.”

After moving to San Francisco and earning a master’s degrees in business and marketing, Stollman became a career woman. She also began teaching yoga. In 2007, Stollman and her husband, Scott, moved to Alameda to raise their daughter.

Stollman lived an incredibly hectic and busy lifestyle and often worked long hours. “I was in suits and high heels,” she said. In the midst of all of that, she was also teaching yoga classes nights and weekends, and still had a family to take care of, now with one more daughter. Over time, her corporate job began to overtake yoga classes, and she scaled back the number of classes she taught. But that eventually became completely unsustainable for her.

Stollman recalled an incident where she was frantically trying to catch the bus in the morning. She was carrying her three-year old daughter, Naomi, in a sling on her body. In one hand, she held Naomi’s head. In her other hand, she gripped the hand of her five-year old daughter, Savanna, as they raced down the stairs.

“I’m holding my baby’s head, you know, in that carrier. And I keep dragging Savanna.”

But then Savanna started crying. She had dropped her toy giraffe, Gerry, and was desperately trying to get him back. She begged for mother to stop.

“’No! We don’t have time.’ I kept running. I felt so bad. She cried and cried and cried,” Stollman remembered. The kindergarten reported to Stollman that Savanna had a bad day, repeatedly asking for Gerry.

“I went home, and it was still down the steps,” Stollman said. She was able to get Gerry back to Savanna, but the experience left her disturbed. “I thought, this is not what I want to teach my kids. This is not what I want them to experience every day.”

After that day, Stollman and her husband sat down and discussed what to do. Considering the options, Stollman made the life-changing decision to leave the corporate world after 15 years. Instead, she would dedicate her time to taking care of her children and teaching yoga.

Many of Stollman’s friends were shocked at the decision. Known for being a career-focused person, they expressed doubt that she would last very long. But Stollman found it easy to keep busy with her two daughters and teaching yoga. Even more shocking to her and her friends was that she found she loved it.

Last February, during meditation, all she could hear was the question, “What are you doing?” She meditated on the question some more and realized many people have been asking her when she was going to open her own studio. “And it just kind of came at once,” Stollman said.

Less than a year later, Stollman is ready to launch Svastha Yoga Hub.

The studio, which was repurposed from a former living space, is equipped with a small kitchen that allows for potential small events. A curtain divider can be put up to hide the kitchen and create a distraction-free area for yoga classes. There is a room equipped with a sauna blanket. Two other private rooms are currently unused, but Stollman hopes to rent to different wellness practitioners such as reiki or massage therapists. The studio also has a second-story deck where people can mingle outside.

The location of the studio is non-descript—the entrance is accessed by going through the parking lot behind East Ocean Restaurant on Webster Street.

Stollman invites people to come to the studio to find a community and simply relax. “Just come and chill out,” she said. “That’s what I want. I want a place for people to just decompress and feel good and not stress so much. This is a place where [people] can come not only to do yoga, but to really transform their lives.”

Vicky Nguyen is a contributing writer for the Alameda Post . Contact her via vicky@alamedapost.com . Her writing is collected at AlamedaPost.com/Vicky-Nguyen .

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