Meet Ally Hamilton | Author, Yoga Teacher, Mom, Wife, Stepmom, Entrepreneur – in whatever order I can do it!

We had the good fortune of connecting with Ally Hamilton and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Ally, can you walk us through the thought-process of starting your business?
I had been practicing yoga for twenty years and teaching yoga for almost fifteen years when I realized it was time to open my own studio. It wasn’t an epiphanous moment of “now is my time” it was more that teaching in other people’s studios had become less and less fulfilling for a variety of reasons. After you’ve devoted your life to something for any significant amount of time of course you’re going to have a perspective about what is essential, how to present the information that has been most helpful to you, the environment you want to create to present the material, the way you want to be treated, and the way you want other people to be treated, just for starters! I was finding that in certain studios I couldn’t teach from my heart in a way that felt free because there were certain rules that didn’t always align with my own ideas, or I felt that the culture of the studio was not a safe environment to express a differing viewpoint. Sometimes decisions would be made that had a negative impact on me, but were outside my control, as happens in any environment when you work for someone else! I was also feeling as someone who had been teaching for so long, that I would love to create a studio where other teachers would love to teach. So that was the impetus behind opening my own studio, but with a two year old and another well on the way, the timing was not what anyone would have wished! Nonetheless, when it’s time, it’s time. Demolition started the day I was in labor, and we opened the doors when my newborn was six weeks old.

Sleep deprivation notwithstanding, opening my own space was amazing, intense, magical, stressful, fifty thousand times harder than I imagined, and everything I hoped it would be. The first year is a blur of classes and teachers and events and diapers and throwing my mat down in the playroom at home to try to stay centered with two babies crawling all over me. Teacher meetings and schedule changes and hiring people and laughter and tears and everything in between. It was fulfilling and exciting and demanding and scary and new and very challenging, but the community that grew out of that experience is something I treasure every single day.

I had been making audio downloads of my live classes for a few years at this point by strapping an iPod (remember those?) on my arm and offering them on my (then) very simple site as “Downloads by Donation.” I was amazed to see how many of my students would download audio versions of my classes to take with them while traveling. So when I opened my own studio in 2009, we began building a streaming website right away. In 2010 a beta version of what is now yogisanonymous.com launched. In effect, we began a second business without knowing for sure how many people would want to stream classes into their living rooms. Turns out, there were a lot of them! So until 2018 Yogis Anonymous had a local yoga studio in Santa Monica with a full schedule and roster of amazing Los Angeles-based teachers, and a streaming site where many of our classes and teachers could be found and shared with subscribers all over the globe. In 2018 the business moved fully online.

Today I devote myself to our online, global community and to the team of teachers who have been with me for the last decade-plus! In both instances, with the local brick-and-mortar studio and the online virtual studio, the thought process behind starting a new business was not really part of the equation. The businesses grew out of a desire to answer a need. And I suspect that is the best impetus to begin any new business. I think it works the most optimally when it’s an answer to your own need to express yourself in a free and authentic way and the business you’re creating is answering a need you see reflected in the world around you.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I own a yoga-and-wellness website called YogisAnonymous.com, and we’ve been streaming yoga and meditation classes around the globe since 2010. I have been overjoyed and so grateful to work with a team of Los Angeles’ best and most beloved teachers from the beginning of this endeavor and am so thrilled to be able to share the over 8,000 classes in our library, and to continue to film new classes every week!

I always wanted the site to be a resource for people looking to make genuine and lasting changes in their lives, to support anyone going through a healing process, and to offer teachers and classes that would meet people wherever they are -whether they are brand-new to yoga or have been practicing for years, whether they want to deepen a meditation practice, understand the yoga sutras more deeply, or learn how to press to handstand in the middle of the room. It doesn’t matter to me what draws someone to this practice, because I know the deeper benefits will become clear in time. To get to connect with people in different parts of the world is a joy I never imagined and something I never take for granted. I truly believe if we want the world around us to be more peaceful, compassionate, kind, tolerant and accepting, then each one of us has to tend to the world that’s happening inside of us every day. I love that I get to create something that makes this practice accessible to people who might not have a local studio down the street, or who might have time constraints or financial constraints that would make it hard to practice otherwise.

One of the things I’m most proud of personally is that I used to be really intimidated by technology, and I managed to overcome the fear that I would press the wrong button or accidentally do something that couldn’t be undone. That fear really stopped me for a while, and also created so much unnecessary tension. So much of what I do each day does involve tech, and I no longer worry. I’ve also learned that 95% of tech glitches can be solved by powering down, walking away and coming back in a little bit. Same holds true for human glitches, sometimes we all need to power down and take a beat!

I started a blog for our brand back in 2009 and reignited my life-long love of writing, which is something I’d only previously shared with teachers at school. Writing “publicly” was new to me and also scary. I can still remember how fast my heart was racing when I shared my first blog post on Facebook. I broke every social media rule there was as far as length and feeling like I only had three seconds to reach people. I wrote about yogic concepts and how they can be so practical and profound for our daily, stress-filled lives. I wrote about my own healing process, struggles with anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia, an eating disorder. As time went on, I held back less and less. I wrote about my divorce, about heartbreak and fear, about how to open to loss and let yourself grieve. I also wrote about opening to joy and trusting in your own process, about being patient with yourself and ways to overcome a loud inner critic. I wrote about being a single mom, about parenting, about finding love as a divorced, single mom and about getting married for a second time, which is not something I thought I would do. I’ve always been transparent about my life and my feelings and all the ways my practice has helped me through. I’ve since written two books, “Open Randomly: Fortune Cookies for the Soul”, and “Yoga’s Healing Power: Looking Inward for Change, Growth and Peace.” I’m working on my memoir now.

But if you want to know what I’m most proud of, it’s my little family. I have two amazing kids. One teenager, and one almost-teenager, who are both just incredible people. Kind, smart, hilarious, loving, affectionate, sweet kids. And a wonderful, funny, loyal, supportive husband who keeps me laughing and knows how to be there. So even when things get hard, and of course they do sometimes, I feel very fortunate.

Sometimes people ask about a work/life balance and I don’t think there’s a formula for that. I think it comes down to priorities and choices. There are only so many hours in the day, and we each have only so much energy. As I’ve gotten older I’ve become a lot more selective about where I spend my time and energy, and saying no has gotten a lot easier. My family always comes first. But the community around the globe is what I consider extended family and I am very hands-on and available to the people who practice with us. Owning a business is hard. There’s no one there at the end of the day to tell you to stop and go home. If something goes wrong, you’re on, that’s it. But the rewards far outweigh the challenges if you believe in what you’re doing. So I think you can “have it all” as long as you learn to have boundaries, prioritize what’s most important to you, and do the school run in your pajamas without beating yourself up about it!

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
I live in Santa Monica because I absolutely love it, so I would be very excited to start right here! I would take my best friend straight down to the beach. I am walking distance from the Santa Monica Pier, so we would have to walk there and stop at Casa del Mar for a drink on the way. We would pass the green where there are tons of acro-yogis doing fun things every day. We’d do a drive up the PCH to Zuma Beach for an afternoon, and another day at Annenberg Beach House to swim and sit by the beautiful pool.

We would do a walk along Main Street and stop at Alfalfa for breakfast, lunch, or a gluten-free doughnut. A trip to Abbot Kinney for window shopping or shopping shopping and coffee at Intelligentsia. Dinner at Tar and Roses back in Santa Monica where there are lots of options for vegetarians and the strawberry ricotta crostata is a must for dessert. A trip to the Griffith Park Observatory. I could be talked into Grauman’s Chinese Theater and the Hollywood Walk if it was someone’s first time in Los Angeles (there’s only one celebrity whose star is on a wall instead of the ground because they didn’t want to be walked on), but I’d probably draw the line at the Hollywood Wax Museum because it freaks me out how life-like everyone is. We would have a drink at the Buffalo Club in Santa Monica one night because that is where I met my husband, and also where we got married three years later.

And we would have to do the last day at the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine which is so peaceful and so beautiful.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I have to dedicate this Shoutout to my kids and my husband who are always understanding, patient and supportive about my work, and an extra shoutout to my youngest who never says anything about the fact that I usually do the morning school run in my pajamas.

Website: yogisanonymous.com

Instagram: @yogisanonymous

Twitter: @yogisanonymous

Facebook: facebook.com/yogisanonymous

Youtube: @yogisanonymous

Other: https://www.amazon.com/Ally-Hamilton/e/B01AOA9AI8

Image Credits
Josh Nelson Photo