My friend said she felt calm the minute she walked into the Golden Bridge Spiritual Center, a Kundalini yoga center near Hollywood and Vine in LA.  The idea behind the center is that you might come for class but you might also stay for a meal, the vegan organic food smelled great and you eat at a long wooden table with everyone else.  Or you might shop for books, CDs, jewelry and clothes – they even had maternity yoga wear, what a great idea.

I’d gone to a session with Gurmuhk, the co-founder, at a yoga conference and really liked her. When she told us she’s in her 60′s I just about fell over, she looks easily 20 years younger.  I also read her maternity yoga book when I was pregnant which is over-the-top baby positive. But I’ll take “Bountiful Beautiful Blissful” any day over “All the Terrifying Things To Expect When You’re Expecting”.

The Golden Bridge building is cool. It felt organic. It’s like someone built it by stucco’ing together crushed leaves and dried fruit instead of pouring cement and putting up steel beams. The roof isn’t flat and somehow natural light flows in and the floor is covered in textured granite tiles. The yoga rooms aren’t rooms in the institutional sense, in fact when we climbed the stairs to our small class room, we looked down and saw that the whole back area is a yoga space where 50 people were sitting meditating.  We didn’t realize they were there.

They offer yoga classes in varying styles, but Kundalini is the main deal. Our class had 3 people in it and the only “standard” yoga pose we did was Down Dog for 3 minutes. The rest of the time was spent doing repetitive movement and breathing designed to build up the energy in the base of our spines and then move it up through our chakras.  It worked, I felt pretty energized by the end of class.

But the test for any yoga class I do is Savasana. If it’s been a good one then I vacate the premises during relaxation and during this class I didn’t just leave the building, I think I was visiting another planet.  I was just gone, it was great. 

Music is a big component of what they do, and it helps when you’ve been doing a movement for 3 minutes. They end every class with everyone singing along to a blessing song that starts “may the warm sun shine upon you”. It’s simply a feel-good place. And in a sprawling transient city like LA, it’s probably a mecca for people who are craving a bit of community with like-minded folks.

When we left our room, there were a dozen parents in the big yoga area at the back dancing their babies around the room to music. I had seen a Moms/Babies class on the schedule but I thought those classes were usually about women attempting yoga poses while their babies crawled under them or fussed to be fed. This looked a lot more fun for both.

My friend was sold and took advantage of the first visit discount and bought a 10 class package. The center isn’t real close to her house but she’s going to try to go on Saturdays.  The real success story here is that we managed to hold onto a good yoga buzz all the way to Malibu for fish tacos and back on surface streets in rush hour. Now that’s an accomplishment.