March 14, 2017

Meet Victoria Satya Vanderkloot of The Soul Center Yoga in San Fernando Valley

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Victoria Satya Vanderkloot.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Victoria Satya. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I grew up in Chappaqua, New York, the Florida Keys and the lower East side and upper West side of New York City. I worked as a stuntwoman in New York until my mentor, Dar Robinson, brought me out to California to do a world record car jump for “That’s Incredible”. He drove the car and I stood up on the back of the car as it jumped over a line of several cars and a helicopter with its blades rotating. If you ask me why I would have to say, “I always had a lot of energy and I didn’t always know what to do with it”.

I worked as a stuntwoman again here in Los Angeles and also found a passion for racing cars. One September morning at Riverside International Speedway, I broke a steering rod on a straightaway and flipped end over end six times and several times from side to side before the car finally came to stop. I felt my neck break on the first hit so I wedged my elbows into the roll cage and grabbed the face guard of my helmet and held on tight until the car stopped moving completely.

Gurmukh, one of my Kundalini Yoga teachers used to say, “The Universe wanted you to be corralled for a while” and corralled I was for the next several years. I was looking for a coach to help me get my body back and decided to find one at California State University, Northridge. My best friend, Hannah Kozak dropped me off at school to take my first class in a wheel chair. At the same time Hannah’s cousin, Susan Kramer, who was 15 years old at the time, met me and took one look at me and said you need to go to a Kundalini Yoga class. I went to Yoga West in Los Angeles and started taking Kundalini Yoga classes and never looked back. I can say honestly that it is because of Kundalini Yoga that I do not have any residual deficits from the injuries I sustained in the racing accident.

I wish I could say that I stopped racing cars, I didn’t, however, I did complete an undergraduate and graduate degree in psychology and developed a great love, respect and passion for Yoga. The deepening of my practice began to come from learning to serve, as I had the great blessing of serving both my Spiritual teacher, Yogi Bhajan, for several years and also my healing teacher, Guru Dev Singh Khalsa, for several decades.

Has it been a smooth road?
My first regular Yoga class was at 7:00am in the morning somewhere in the late 80’s, I drove an hour to get to the Yoga center and the three people that braved the early morning hour for my class never came on the same day. The days that no one showed up I would just sit on the teacher’s bench and play music until my class was over.

Every morning at 3:40am this same room, that I was in, was full of people doing a group sadhana for two and a half hours, by the time I got there the space was so beautiful I just felt I didn’t want to leave. It takes a long time to develop yourself as a teacher an even longer time to develop a strong deep practice and a life time to discover who you are at the core.

So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the The Soul Center Yoga story. Tell us more about the business.
Satya’s studio, Yoga by the Sea – The Soul Center Yoga, is located in West Hills, California, where she teaches group classes and gives private instruction to adults, children, pregnant women and people with special needs. Meditation classes are held in the evening with live music and chanting lead by a very talented teacher, Brian Lottman.

Satya has studied the sacred science of Kundalini Yoga, as taught by Yogi Bhajan, since 1990, healing a serious personal injury through this ancient tradition. She is an internationally certified Kundalini Yoga teacher, a certified practitioner in the Sat Nam Rasayan Tradition, and holds a Master’s degree in Psychology. She draws on these qualities and on her background as a professional athlete to make her classes reach the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual levels.

Satya specializes in working with people who are facing medical, physical and emotional challenges and has extensive experience working with people with Cancer. Satya has taught One-on-One Private Restorative Yoga and Meditation classes at Premiere Oncology.

Satya teaches, “A Meditative Workshop for Heart Patients”, at UCLA for The California Heart Center Foundation. She has also taught, “Yoga and Meditation for Healing”, at Kaiser Hospitals, Out Patient Facility.

Satya has taught Yoga and Meditation at Summit Malibu, a drug and alcohol addiction treatment program, where she worked One-on-One with children and adults suffering from chemical dependency and related disorders. She also led vision and life design workshops there.

How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
Yoga is spreading and growing into all fields of life styles, people that practice Yoga regularly get really fit and begin to open up in big ways. Their bodies are primed for meditation and this studio is diving deep into the practice of both Yoga and Meditation.

Bringing new leads to the center is not easy; the competition is fierce, as there are Yoga centers on every corner. Word of mouth is no longer enough to keep the intimate boutique style Yoga centers alive and marketing is really expensive and doesn’t always work.

Pricing: