Manifestation—it's one of those words that might not hold much weight until you've imagined something important, but maybe seemingly unattainable, and seen it come to life. It's also how yogi and blogger Shayla Quinn started her journey when she was working at the Alo Beverly Hills store, dreaming of being a yoga teacher in the Alo community.
She opened up about her story after a recent yoga class that she taught at Alo headquarters, radiating so much joy that you never would have guessed she was in a funk just a few hours before. "I tend to be more insecure than confident," she tells us. "It’s something I’m working on. Even walking into the Alo store at the Grove. I’m like, 'Am I good enough to teach here?' I’ve been battling with it. Two days ago, I finally was like, enough. Stop getting in your own way. You are here for a reason." The reason being, she worked really hard to get there, and honed in on her power to manifest change.
Shayla moved to L.A. from Orange County at 19 to pursue acting and music. She worked in nightlife to pay the bills and focused on her real passions during her downtime. A month after moving she took her first yoga class, and, equipped with an extensive dance background, figured it would be a breeze. Reality kicked in after the first flow when she realized how challenged she felt—both physically and emotionally. But she kept returning to the mat. "I would take really long breaks from my practice, and then something would happen in my life, and I’d be like, I need yoga." Shayla even did two teacher trainings, but solely for the purpose of deepening her practice. "It was like sending myself to a little spiritual bootcamp," she says.
Then, two years, ago, she realized she was spinning her wheels but not getting any closer to her goals. So she started her blog Namastshay (we're big fans!), dove into deepening her practice, took up meditation and, two months after that, started working on the retail team at the Alo Beverly Hills store. She had seen one of the teachers in her training wearing Alo and, when the first store opened, visited with her mom. "I remember sitting up in the studio and thinking, I want to teach here. I want to be a part of this brand." A few weeks later, shopping in the store, she asked a sales associate if they were hiring, and the next thing she knew, she was helping customers find their perfect leggings.
Still burning the midnight oil at a job in a nightclub (and hating every minute of it), Shayla worked shifts at Alo during the day and squeezed in blogging whenever she could. After about a year, she just couldn't keep it up anymore, and left her job at the store with a heavy heart—and a newfound goal of becoming a yoga teacher—vowing to stay in touch. Fast forward to a year later, and our Culture and Community Manager asked her to teach a single class at headquarters. "I was like, what? Me? This is crazy!" she tells us. At that point, Shayla was working 20-hour days. She was gaining traction on her blog and Instagram, and knew that teaching that one class had the potential to turn into a full-time gig... but she was scared to make the shift.
"I’ve never felt more like me than I do now. I never thought that I could be this happy. Yoga’s the magic."
A manifestation class she took around this time with Alo yogi Koya Webb changed all that. "It was a really powerful class. She had us focus on gratitude and visualize what we wanted to create more of in our life. All I could think was, I want to do more of what I’m already doing," she says. She was so inspired after Koya's class that she made postcards with affirmations of what she wanted to manifest and put them all over her house. Everything came to a head one night when she went in to her nightclub job. "I was hanging on by a thread, and it just didn’t feel right. I ended up having a panic attack. I left work that night at 3:30 in the morning, after working all day, and thought, I’m not going back there. I’m going to take a chance, I’m going to trust in my passion and the business that I’ve created and this is going to work." The next day, she got an email about taking on a private client, and from there, the work just started to flow. A week and a half later, she was offered a job teaching regularly at our new store at the Grove. "I literally broke into tears," she says. "I was like, this is not happening. You know this is Shayla, right?"
It wasn't until after she took the leap of faith that she really understood the power of manifestation. While she was trying to decide whether or not to quit her night job, Shayla's friend told her a quote that stuck with her: "your world will not expand unless you do." She repeated it over and over again to herself, and the second that she started to let the toxic parts of her life go, "it was like magic," she says. And now, she couldn't imagine doing anything else. "I’ve never felt more like me than I do now. I never thought that I could be this happy. Yoga’s the magic."
On February 24, Shayla's journey will come full circle when she teams up with Koya Webb to teach a manifestation class, just like the one that gave her the space to change her life. You can sign up for the class here. Want to keep up with Shayla? Follow her on Instagram.
