Meet Reika Shucart of Reikayoga in Long Beach

Today we’d like to introduce you to Reika Shucart.

Reika, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I am a full-time yoga teacher in Long Beach, California. This was not my original career path, and I never expected yoga to become my profession.

It all started when I was born in Kathmandu, Nepal. My mother is Japanese and my father is American. They met in Kathmandu and owned a gem and jewelry business in Nepal for many years. I moved to Japan when I was one year old and lived there until I finished elementary school. My mother and sisters and I moved to Colorado to attend middle and high school, while my father remained in Japan working as a college professor. I attended university in Long Beach, California. My major was Sociology at California State University, Long Beach. For my junior year, I studied abroad in South Africa and fell in love with the country. I decided to finish my last year of CSULB quickly so I could move back to South Africa for graduate school. In 2010, I was back in Cape Town, South Africa as a graduate student in the Sociology department with a focus on Development Studies. I was fortunate enough to travel to many different countries while growing up, and I always felt that my purpose in life was to help people. Though unsure of the details, I knew that was destined to be my path. As a graduate student, I interned with local and International NGOs in Cape Town. I thought my path was to help people by working for a community development organization either at the grass-roots level or with a large, international NGO. After living in South Africa for two and a half years, I graduated with a Master’s degree and decided to travel to South and Central America. I bought a one-way ticket to Peru and took nine months to travel back to California. It was a life-changing experience. I learned so very much about myself and matured as a person during these nine months. I realized that I did not need a lot of material possessions to be happy, but rather I wanted a simple life in a loving community and a meaningful career.

During my long journey, I somehow landed a job in Nicaragua working for a US-based organic farming non-profit organization. I became a trip-leader for high school and college students engaged in volunteer tourism. After living, working and traveling in Central and South American for another nine months, I returned to Long Beach. There I attended a ten-day silent meditation retreat in Vipassana Buddhism. I was in search of something…I don’t know if I found it during this meditation retreat, but I did get a glimpse of what it’s like to have a contented mind, and what it’s like to find peace in stillness. Soon after the meditation retreat, I took a job as a travel guide/trip leader for a travel company in Hawaii. This led me to work for Backroads, the world’s largest active travel company, as a bicycle tour guide. I loved these jobs because they allowed me to travel the world and visit places I thought I would never be able to see. I was able to hike, bike, and camp in beautiful places all over the world. Even better, for once in my life I wasn’t broke. Travel became my lifestyle. I was able to make a good living by traveling all over the world. But I felt that something was missing. I knew in the back of my head that this was not my ultimate path, this was not my purpose in life. I didn’t feel like I was helping people or contributing to the world as a travel guide.

Spirituality and meditation remained an intrinsic part of my Being throughout these journeys. Both of my parents are Buddhists, and they taught me how to meditate when I was quite young. So when I was first introduced to yoga at CSULB, the practice already felt familiar. It was a gradual start. I just took yoga classes here and there. I was in graduate school in South Africa when I started to practice yoga more regularly. For the first time in my life, I remember looking at my yoga teacher in Cape Town and thinking to myself “I want to become a yoga teacher” because, in my eyes, yoga teachers always had a special glow. They seemed to glow from the inside out, no matter their age. This thought stayed with me for years, and finally, in 2017, I took a leap of faith and enrolled in a one-month intensive yoga teacher training course with Yogaworks in Santa Monica. I had a few months break from my travel jobs and I remember promising myself that I was going to look for a job as a yoga teacher after this training and see if I could make a living at it. If I couldn’t, I was planning to go back to my travel job. But if I could make a living and enjoy it, then I would keep at it. Three years later, I am still working as a full-time yoga instructor in Southern LA. I love what I do, and for the first time in my life, I feel like I am on the right path, and that this is what I was meant to do. I feel aligned with my beliefs; I feel aligned with the world; I feel like I am finally doing something meaningful.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
No, I haven’t had a smooth road at all. I remember feeling lost and broke, with student loan officers breathing down my neck. There were several periods spent looking for a job with a non-profit in LA and just not finding one. I felt useless, worthless, and depressed. It felt like I was fighting against the stream, and that I might even drown in the river of life. I would try so hard, but nothing I did would go well. When I was traveling and working as a guide, I felt alone. I felt like I did not belong anywhere, and living the peripatetic life of a nomad was having a toll on me. I was exhausted from constantly moving and living out of my backpack for years on end. After I completed my yoga teacher training and started to work in the field, I took every opportunity that came my way. I would sometime teach as many as twenty-six yoga and spin classes per week. I would clean studios, walk dogs, do almost anything to make ends meet.

Then I enrolled in a 500-hour yoga teacher training course in LA. This meant that I would have to commute to LA three to five times per week, on the metro as I owned no car. I was going from one studio to the next to meet my requirements for graduating from the program. Some days I would wake up 5:30 am to catch the metro to Pasadena to take a yoga class from my mentor. Sometime I would arrive late at night at a cheap, somewhat shady-looking Airbnb so I could sleep in a bunk-bed somewhere in LA because the metro didn’t run that late. I volunteered and traded work hours to get discounts for various types of yoga training. All that hard work was worth it, though. Even today I still work hard, and things don’t come easy for me. But at least now I don’t feel like I’m fighting against the stream anymore. Now I am going with the flow, and it is pushing me onward, reassuringly in the right direction.

So, as you know, we’re impressed with Reikayoga – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of and what sets you apart from others.
I am a full-time yoga teacher in Southern LA, mostly in Long Beach. I regularly teach group yoga classes at several different studios, plus I teach private yoga classes, corporate yoga classes, and I also hold weekend retreats and other different events. The type of classes I teach varies from heated and non-heated vinyasa, from the beginner’s level to advanced classes. I also teach gentle yoga classes, such as yin and restorative yoga. I specialize in teaching Accessible Yoga. This is where my passion lies. I am trained in Accessible Yoga as well as Trauma-Informed yoga so I can combine my passion for yoga with my calling to help people. In accessible yoga class EVERY-BODY is welcome. No matter their physical ability, age, size, gender, race, cultural background, religion or income. I have taught yoga to at-risk youths, victims of domestic violence, children with special needs, seniors, stroke survivors, people in wheelchairs, etc.

One of the reasons I feel passionate about Accessible Yoga is because I can relate to my students in this setting. I had the experience of not being able to speak English when I first moved to the US. I felt like I didn’t belong. Also, I know the feeling of being injured and not being capable of moving in the way I want. I’ve felt both defeated and excluded. These experiences explain why I want to teach Accessible Yoga. Sometimes the toughest part of teaching an accessible yoga class is that you might have one student in a wheel-chair, a senior with limited mobility, and someone with limited English all in the same class. The challenge is how to create a class that everybody can participate in. This is the type of class that makes me feel the most fulfilled when I teach it. That feeling of wanting to be of service to people and the world, the feeling of working with a purpose, was what was lacking in all of my previous jobs and adventures. Now I have finally found it.

I recently started teaching an Accessible Yoga workshop as a part of a 200-hour yoga teacher training program in a Long Beach studio. This is great because when I took my 200-hour teacher training, accessible yoga was not a part of the curriculum. I believe this to be a crucial part of a yoga teacher’s skillset and yet it was lacking in the standard training courses. On my future path, I see myself teaching more and more accessible yoga classes, and also teaching accessible yoga training courses for new teachers. I strongly believe that yoga is for EVERYONE, and it should not be limited to an exclusive segment of the population. I want to help spread yoga to ALL, and I want to help other yoga teachers to be able to spread yoga to ALL.

So, what’s next? Any big plans?
I would love to lead an International yoga retreat, possibly in Bali. I would also like to make my work more remote by teaching yoga online, so I will have more freedom to travel and work.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.reikayoga.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reikayoga/

Image Credit:
Rsee, Carlos Lopez

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