Exploring Life & Business with Emily Maclean Carrie Meadows of Crescent Yoga

Today we’d like to introduce you to Emily Maclean Carrie Meadows

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
Emily MacLean and Carrie Meadows are co-owners of Crescent Yoga in the West Altadena Business district.

Emily has been in the Los Angeles yoga community for over two decades. Starting her practice in Pasadena at Yoga House in 1998, she began working at the studio soon after. In 2000 she began teaching yoga at various studios throughout the city, as well as CalTech and Occidental College. For a time she managed Live Art Pilates in Beverly Hills, getting her first taste of how a studio works. Then she became the yoga advisor and manager of Namaste Studios in Highland Park, Downtown LA and West Adams, further honing her skills and understanding of running a yoga studio.

Carrie has been practicing and teaching yoga in LA-area studios for over a decade. She sought out yoga as a balance to years of distance running and was surprised by how quickly she fell in love with asana. The desire to advance her practice and share her passion with others led her to Mission Street Yoga, where she completed yoga teacher training and met Emily. Upon completing her training Carrie began teaching classes at Urth Yoga in
Silverlake and Yoga Rock in Montrose, where she stayed through March 2020. During the pandemic she continued to serve long-time students with online classes and completed a Corrective Exercise Specialist program through the International Sport Sciences Association, gaining more tools and experience to help clients with joint pain.

While studying together at Mission Street Yoga Carrie and Emily became fast friends and soon decided to take up the mantle of opening their own studio. They share in the vision that owning a studio is about providing for the community. They consider themselves caretakers of the practice and are grateful for the opportunity to share
their knowledge and to provide an Altadena yoga home to students and teachers.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Emily and Carrie had been looking for a space for Crescent Yoga and had almost signed a lease when COVID restrictions forced local studios and gyms to shut down, bringing their dream to a temporary halt.  Three years later they resumed their search, found the perfect location at Lincoln and Acacia, and opened the doors at Crescent Yoga late September 2023.  The Altadena community has been incredibly supportive and excited about getting a local yoga studio.  They have embraced the studio as a sort of home away from home, a real necessity that many have expressed the need for, especially coming out of the restrictions from COVID.  Crescent Yoga is a place that feels safe to practice in but doesn’t have the impersonality of a lot of the corporate studios that have popped up in the surrounding areas.  Although competing with the big chains seemed a bit daunting at first, the Crescent Yoga community has quickly grown into a family.  Emily and Carrie attribute this to their incredible teachers who bring a breadth of knowledge and experience into the studio and to a community that is hungry for all that the practice of yoga has to offer, not the limited scope of the corporate chains.   Emily and Carrie know that yoga is more than just a workout.  It is a practice for our minds and bodies, a place to cultivate awareness, strength and clarity.  They created Crescent Yoga as safe harbor for that exploration because they know that if everyone practiced a little yoga the world would be a better place!

As you know, we’re big fans of Crescent Yoga. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
2230 Lincoln Avenue
Altadena, CA 91001

How do you think about luck?
The yoga tradition offers the concept of leela, which means that we can live consciously, from a place of self-knowledge, while also knowing that there are things in life that are out of our control (luck). Sometimes this luck comes in the form of a challenge (like COVID), and other times it comes as a gift (like finding the right business partner). The ability to tap into self-knowledge and act from that place, regardless of what luck the universe presents, is what makes amazing things happen, like Crescent Yoga.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://crescentyoga.la
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/crescentyoga.la/
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/crescent-yoga-altadena

Image Credits
All photos taken by Carrie Meadows, Co-Owner of Crescent Yoga