Bryan Kest at Buddhi Yoga La Jolla

Bryan Kest at Buddhi Yoga La Jolla

What happens when you bring one of the most prominent yoga teachers in the country to teach at your yoga studio? Lots and lots of students come from near and far just to spend three hours with him. Buddhi Yoga La Jolla’s first yoga workshop of the year with Bryan Kest was just the thing to test the capacity of our newly-expanded space with over eighty yogis who were eager to hear his words of wisdom. The founder of Power Yoga, an unapologetic, potty-mouth and all around yoga badass left everyone deeply changed forever.

Bryan Kest at Buddhi Yoga

Bryan Kest Dropping Wisdom at Buddhi Yoga

Yoga doesn’t want to change you, yoga just wants to take care of you.
Bryan Kest Dropping Wisdom at Buddhi YogaIt’s not about how it looks, it’s about how it feels.

Bryan Kest isn’t like your average yoga teacher. He’s not trying to portray an image of what a yoga teacher should be like. In fact, he’s purposely pushing your buttons so you can judge him and so you can be triggered in order to deal with whatever comes up for you. Bryan tells it like it is and he shares what he’s learned through direct yoga experience over thirty-seven years of practice. Yoga makes us more aware of our “shit” if you will, and we’re only using that word because that’s how Bryan would have said it. This practice, if used correctly, helps us overcome our malevolent qualities and teaches us to connect with what’s truly important in life.

Bryan’s Universal Laws

We only wish we had recorded the entire workshop because it was line after line of hilarious and powerful bits of “Bryanisms” that we’d love to replay. Let’s start by listing out his five laws and we’ll do our best to elaborate a little.

  • The harder you are on anything, the faster you wear it out!
  • You cannot take care of something you do not touch
  • If you give it food it becomes strong, if you don’t, it starves and dies
  • Change
  • The integrity of the web depends on the resiliency of every strand

As Americans, engraved deep within us is competition, no pain/no gain, harder, younger, faster, and more, more, more. If you’re rough on something, be prepared for it to fall apart – no matter what it is and if you’re chasing happiness “out there” you’ll never be happy. On that note, it’s also true that in order to heal something, you must be willing to touch it gently. That goes for physical wounds, emotional, relationships, etc.

Bryan talks about what we feed in our minds. Do we feed the fear and the pain and the jealousy or can we focus on feeding the qualities of ourselves that are beneficial to us and everyone around us? He goes on to discuss change. Our entire life is one long sequence of change. Everything is constantly shifting or changing, nothing stays the same. So it doesn’t turn out too well when we don’t go with the flow. Lastly, what we see in the world is a direct reflection of what’s going on inside of us. We are just as judgmental, violent, critical, and so on about ourselves as what we see on the news. We cannot experience a different reality outside of us until we are willing to become aware and ready to do something about what’s going on internally. If you don’t do yoga yet, we think it’s time to start. We want to thank Bryan Kest for his knowledge and for spreading the word about the benefits of yoga all over the world. If you can’t get to our La Jolla Yoga studio, do online yoga with Bryan at poweryoga.com or with us at yourBuddhi.com.

One more gem from Bryan: “The only way to measure progress in your yoga practice–is when you stop f*cking measuring progress in your yoga practice.” Namaste.



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