Assisting his clients in buying and selling homes as a real estate broker for South Bay Real Estate & Mortgage is a pretty demanding job for Eddie Bustamante that he says is constantly filled with lots of stress.
To unwind from a long, grueling day at the office, Bustamante takes to yoga to clear his mind, body and soul.
The benefits he received from yoga like calmness and clarity were very powerful that he said he wanted to share it with others, so nine months ago he opened Kula Yoga at 305 Third Ave.
Kula means community in Sanskrit, and he said community is what he is trying to build with the yoga community in the South Bay.
“Our thing is to bring awareness to the community to everybody that’s never done yoga or has done yoga,” he said. “What I wanted to do is bring that awareness to everybody and make people feel what I feel through Yoga,” he said.
In the 500 square-foot studio, Bustamante offers free classes for beginners, intermediate and advanced students during morning or evening sessions.
“It’s more of a personalized practice,” he said. “We teach from the ground up.”
The studio, he said, was designed to provide an intimate, peaceful feel for his students. He said he averages about 15 to 20 students a session.
Students in his 75-minute long classes learn proper breathing techniques, the correct body postures, and because his classes are small, they get one-on-one interactions with Bustamante or with any of the other two instructors.
His classes cost $10 a session or members can pay a monthly fee that varies in cost depending on the promotion for the month. He said his classes are a mixture of men and women who are at all different stages in their yoga journey.
Bustamante said the opportunity to house his business on Third Avenue just came to him when his friend who owned the fruit smoothie store next door to the studio offered him the space.
He said with the recent changes to downtown Chula Vista, Third Avenue was the perfect location to open a yoga studio.
“There’s a lot of foot traffic,” he said about Third Avenue. “The city has been developing it and it is a good storefront location.”
Being a first time business owner has presented some challenges for Bustamante, but he said he tackles operating a business just like he approaches yoga.
“The more you are patient, the more the results will come,” he said. “You just got to stay true to yourself.
The Eastlake High School graduate said he is still trying to promote his business as it is still new, but most of his students learned about his business through word of mouth from other students.
Bustamante comes from a yoga family.
His sister was the first one to take up yoga, followed by his father. Bustamante said he started practicing yoga about six-years ago when his father invited him to a session.
“I didn’t know anything about yoga (at the time),” he said. “ I went to my first yoga class, kind of went with the flow and I just liked how I felt, like the results of feeling calm, stress free and feeling really good, almost like if I was floating.”
Bustamante became a certified yoga instructor last spring.
Bustamante said today he incorporates yoga methods to get through his daily job.
“Real Estate and yoga are almost different worlds, “ he said. “With yoga it would help me just stay calm, patient with work stuff like timelines, deadlines and taking my yoga into the work environment. How I use real estate to yoga is just by being a people person and being able to talk to everybody.”
