By Joslyn Hamilton

With props to Matthew Teague Miller for his creative input.

Sandal Satchel is an aspiring Curiosity Master actively exploring the art, science, and play of Yoga, Bodywork, and the Path of Joyful Living.

Her Teaching style is both classical and modern, playful and serious, challenging and super basic, soothing and military, flowing and,— you guessed it — precisely alignment-based. Her vision (and, one might say, her desperate striving) is to be all things to all yogis without ever actually committing to one single style.

Her deep affection for nature and her BFA in modern dance led her to become a yoga teacher — which has nothing to do with either but makes her sound like a deep yogi, somehow. In her early-20s, a feeble attempt at withstanding the 9-5 life repelled her toward her true bliss as a part-time yoga teacher.

At a certain point on her Path of Righteous Dharma, Sandal moved to the spiritual epicenter of this ancient science of yoga — Los Angeles — where she began to pray for a guru. This daily prayer manifested Master Teacher Sri Yadayada in her life. Through her work with Sri Yadadada, she has become a non-dualist: a profoundly co-dependant state of attachment to one’s guru that leads to a complete lack of boundaries and some other things that may have happened behind closed doors, but mum’s the word, and besides, yoga teachers are only human, right? Am I right?

In her classes, she offers a Tantric-Vinyasa practice that encourages an “inner listening.”

Shh, can you hear it? Well you might be able to, but chances are she is playing a Coldplay song so loudly that she is literally having to shout to be heard over the surround-sound. Don’t worry; what she lacks in skill and safety she makes up for in confidence and bravado — and the gift of being able to assault your ears with her iPod DJing skills while literally never taking a breath between her words.

When you drop in for your daily exercise class with Sandal, she will proceed to presumptively “take you on a Journey through Awareness and Connection, smoothing and harmonizing energy; consciousness of the mental level then offers the opportunity to rest in the peace that is our true nature.”* She is fully aware that that last sentence didn’t make any sense, but she feels that it’s not necessary to always make sense if one’s spirit is soaring free through the ethers of yogic rapture.

After all, her lack of attachments to this earthly world include a stark lack of attachment to this thing we call “literacy.” She values the hypnosis of stringing a bunch of spiritual words together far more than she values, say, reading. She is also partial to mis-using punctuation and throwing around ampersands as a way of expressing her deep creativity and her irreverent, playful nature. She is a strong Believer in the arbitrary capitalization of certain Words to express her affinity with Them as an illustration of her extreme Deepness. She is all about Questioning the Status Quo.

One devoted student says, “I literally never have any idea what’s going on in her class, but after 90 minutes of inhaling Nag Champa fumes and straining to understand what she is talking about in a room heated to the blood-boiling point, the exhaustion in my body feels an awful lot like bliss. I’ll take it!”

She loves chia seeds (only if they are vegan), but occasionally smokes a cigarette right after class to help her unwind.

* Note: This line, unchanged, was taken from a real live teacher bio.

About Joslyn Hamilton

 

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