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Jessica Bellofatto on Yoga Privates and Being a Yogi-Triathlete

Jessica Bellofatto (via kamadeva)

Jessica Bellofatto is the Founder and Director of KamaDeva Yoga in East Hampton. 

I’ve always been a runner, but a pretty casual runner, and about six years back I was driving by Long Beach where there was this triathlon going on. There were hundreds of people in the water, and I was like, I want to do that. It was only about two or three years ago that I started getting more serious about it. I got on a road bike and started cycling outside.

A lot of people want yoga to be what keeps them in shape. They want it to provide the stretch, strengthening, and cardio. But bringing in the swimming and biking and running, that’s actually what brought me into balance, and it means yoga doesn’t have to be everything. So it can be what it is, and I can actually go deeper into it. I’ve always been pretty flexible, things came pretty easy to me, but you definitely get tight from triathlon training, and now that I feel things more quickly and have to work with that resistance, it’s just more interesting.  

When you’re teaching a class you have to deal with however many students are in the room and whatever energy is out in the room. It’s a whole experience, it’s not just calling out poses. If you’re choosing to use popular music in yoga class, it should never be random. You don’t just play Prince because you like it. I love juggling all that, that’s what I find fun, the sort of choreography of the whole class, and depending on the energy of the people, you feed off that energy.

But I’ve also had amazing one-on-one experiences where I’m teaching a yoga private and the exchange of energy is just so great. Back in teacher training they always said you need a weekly private. You have people who have been doing yoga for years, but they’ve never checked in with themselves, they’ve just been swept away in the energy of the class. They’ve never checked in on their own alignment.

But my favorite is teaching retreats. There’s just this aspect of having the same 15 students or whatever for six straight days, two classes a day. Being able to see their bodies on day one and day three, and all their habits. It’s always this sort of motley crew and then by day three everyone is family, and the yoga levels always seem to somehow work out.