Check Out Esak Garcia’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Esak Garcia.

Hi Esak, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I was born into yoga. My mom has a picture of herself standing on her head with a huge pregnant belly – that was me inside. I never was interested in the practice until I was a teenager. Before that it was just something mom did. When I was in highschool training for various sports, my sister got into hot yoga, and she insisted that my mom try it becuase my mom often said her dream was to have a studio in a tropical climate. My mom and sister then had a mutual dream: they were folding towels together reading a newspaper article about my mom’s new studio. Shortly after that we shipped my mom off to yoga teacher training. That was 1994. I was a junior in high school. I got into the practice at the same time becuase hot yoga appealed to me. At first because I thought it would help me with sports, which it did, but then I left the sports behind and have been with the hot yoga practice ever since.
I did my formal hot yoga training in 2001. In 2003 for the first time ever athletic yoga asana championships were held in the USA. In 2004 I began to study Self-Realization yoga philosophy with my teacher Dr. Carolyne “Ezeese” Fuqua. In 2005 I won an international yoga sports championship that had the participation of 25 countries. In 2007 I started the Jedi Fight Club, which is a boot camp style yoga immersion, which replicates the way I trained for those championships, with a heavy emphasis on universal laws and non-physical yoga principles that undergird the physical practice. In 2016 I began my own teacher training program which focuses on a traditional sequence of 84 asanas that comes from Calcutta, India. My training program takes a minimim of 2 years to complete.
Today I travel the world with my teacher Ezeese as a student and disciple of her unique Slef’Realization studies, and I offer hot yoga workshops and yoga trainings everywhere I go. I mostly work with students of the Jedi training and my teacher training programs.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Overall it has been more smooth than struggle. I never looked for yoga. I was introduced to something that appealled to me as a teenager and have not lost interest since. My teacher says that if you do something with a high vibration than all opportunities offer themselves to you. That has been my experience overall. They yoga part is fun and exciting, the business part is something that requires work and effort, but I focus mostly on enjoying what I do and that has worked well for me. I don’t have a high tolerance for stess, gring, and hustle – those things seem to be self-perpetuating. I tend to turn away when I feel those experiecnes becoming prevalent. By the way I was valedictorian the Boulder High class of 1994. I got a academic scholarship to Yale. I studied there for 3 years and left before I got my degree, for the reasons I just mentioned. I left Yale in 1999, 1 year before graduating. I moved to Brazil to play Capoeira and I fell back in love with my life. Yoga was in the background when I was in Brazil, but it was practiceing yoga there that convinced me to get some fomal training. I knew that I wanted to keep doing it.
COVID was interesting, but it didn’t slow me down. In fact my business grew during the shut down.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I teach hot yoga in 3 levels. Level 1 is the 26&2 sequence know to the world as Bikram yoga. I don’t use the name “Bikram” because of all the scandals that surround his name. But I beleive in the practice very much. It is universally accessible to all walks of life, and people in any physical condition. Level 2 is the e84 Intermediate class, and Jedi training. These are practices that take the level 1 foundation and deepen it to develop skills that are uncommon, like handstands and Lotus. The level 2 practice is for people who have more than a casual interest in yoga, it’s for people who really love it and want more. The level 3 of hot yoga is the 84-asana sequence. This is where you develope mastery. Very few people in any field are actually willing to do what it takes to master it.
The above is my work, it’s what I specialize in, and what I’m known for. It’s what makes my brand of hot yoga different from other kinds of hot yoga you find out there. But what I’m most inspired by and excited about are the spiritual studies that I do with Ezeese. If I were to nutshell that work, I’d say it entails, first, the study of spiritual laws and principles, like vibration, mentalism, and correspondance; and then, the observance and self-applicaltion of these principles into my life and relationships. My yoga work and my personal life are where I get to apply the lessons I learn with her.

In terms of your work and the industry, what are some of the changes you are expecting to see over the next five to ten years?
When I started practicing yoga over 30 years ago, before the internet was prevelant, there was a much heavier reliance on teachers. Now teachers and gurus are downtrending. They are associalted with cults and week-minded people. Individualism runs deep in the Western mind, and I see yoga practitioners wanting to do their own thing right away. Ultimately, what determines a person’s satisfaction with the life they create for themself is their ability to keep their own vibration high. With or without teachers, if you are doing that you are winning.

Everything in the physical world experiences rhythym, meaning ebb and flow, rise and fall, increase and decrease. So I think the value of teachers will be a thing that people desire again at an unknow time in the future. As for the next 10-years, I think that mastery will continue to be soemthing that is overlooked by the desire for imediate results. I think trendy yoga styles will pop up and gain attention until the next sexy style comes allong. AI will probably help yoga novices develop some cool biusiness ideas. I see my work as a small pocket within the industry where mastery is of utmost importance. I’m not concerned with being popular or how long mastery takes. I think I will continue to attract people who desire mastery and my business will continue to flourish in it’s unpopular way.

Pricing:

• Online classes – $14/class $75/month
• Yoga immersions – $500/week
• Teacher trainings – $1000/week

Contact Info:

• Website: https://esakgarcia.com
• Instagram: @esakgarcia @e84yoga @jedifightclub
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/e84yoga and https://www.facebook.com/JediFightClub
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@esakgarcia

Image Credits
image 1 @aarya_kuldeep
image 2 @vhbetancourt
image 4&5 @minttumaari