Meet Andrea Arriaga, RYT 200

Tell us about the evolution of your Yoga practice:

I started practicing Bikram Yoga seriously in my early college years. As I went on to grad school, I continued my Yoga adventuring while practicing throughout South East Asia. During my travels I was immersed in both the Hindu and Buddhist cultures and this broadened my experience and understanding of the practice. Yoga became my passion, both to practice and to share. The more I understood and experienced, the more I realized I had so much more to learn. I continued to study with amazing teachers while finishing grad school in Hawaii and running Yoga surf retreats while living in Mexico. There, I met my primary teacher, Matt Pesendian.

What’s one piece of advice you would share with a student new to Yoga?:

Make time for a dedicated practice, even if it is just a few minutes a day. No matter what’s going on in life.

Why do you teach Yoga?

Yoga has been such a gift in my own life, carrying me through some of my life’s most trying times and opening doors to living my dreams. Sharing Yoga is one of the few things in life that has never felt like a choice. It is just a natural reciprocity of wanting to give back to others because the practice has provided me with such a great experience of connection as well as a path for personal growth, inner peace and conscious evolution. 

How do you hope your students will feel after taking your class?

I hope that in some way, my classes inspire students to be more free in sharing their gifts and remembering what is truly important to them.

Andrea’s favorite inspirational quote:

“Let the beauty you love be what you do.
There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”
-Rumi