#when it happened. so like. was it just teens being dramatic or did calvin actually do something that warranted Losing A Fucking Eye.
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i’m a fischoeder enthusiast and apologist sorry
#bob’s burgers#the bob's burgers movie#mr. fischoeder#calvin fischoeder#felix fischoeder#grover fischoeder#bob’s burgers fanart#would LOVE to know why felix took out calvin’s eye. like the picture in the movie implies they were teens/young adults#when it happened. so like. was it just teens being dramatic or did calvin actually do something that warranted Losing A Fucking Eye.#also i want to snap grover in half like a twig
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BBB Week 31 and 32 Roundup!
Two weeks of content here, go make sure to leave our participants some love!
Title: Height Restriction
Collaborator: MagicaDraconia16
Link: AO3
Square Filled: Y2 - "Are you even trying?"
Ship: WinterIronStrange
Rating: Teen
Major Tags: Humor, animal transformation, magic
Summary: Hit by a stray spell of Loki's during battle, Tony discovers it has a rather unusual effect. The penthouse was not made for this.
Word Count: 2256
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Title: Just Don’t Bite Me, Okay?
Collaborator: riotwritesthings
Link: Tumblr
Square Filled: U5 - Animal Transformation
Ship: WinterIron
Rating: Teen
Major Tags: moodboard and tiny fic, non-graphic injury, vaguely post-AoU, animal transformation, Bucky Barnes on the run, Tony Stark has always been a cat but now it’s official
Summary: Tony hates magic. He hates it for a lot of reasons, not least of all his current predicament. Bucky on the other hand is much too busy struggling to stay alive to worry about anything else, much less magic. Right up until he finds an injured cat in an alley.
Word Count: 404
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Title: The Legacy - Chapter 2: Discovering the Legacy
Collaborator: caiti-creative-corner
Link: AO3
Square Filled: C3 - Free Space
Ship: Clint/Laura
Rating: Teen
Major Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence
Summary: The Avengers find out about the existence of the Legacy.
Word Count: 2834
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Title: The Lemurian Star (1625, Georges Batroc)
Collaborator: plutosrose
Link: AO3
Square Filled: B5 - Star Watching
Ship: Stucky
Rating: Explicit
Major Tags: FBI, Art Theft, "He's a Ghost Story", idiots to lovers, Blow Jobs, How to Get Fired
Summary: “Are you here to talk about the case?” “You mean my case,” James fixed him with a stern glare. “It’s not your case.” Steve blinked at him. “What the hell are you talking about? It’s in my department, Fury assigned it to me...”James shook his head. “You don’t know shit about HYDRA. I do. So yeah, it’s my case.”-Steve gets assigned a wild goose chase of an art theft case with infamous fellow agent James Barnes.
Word Count: 3466
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Title: Kickstart my heart
Collaborator: Kalee60
Link: AO3
Square Filled: U2 - speed dating
Ship: Stucky
Rating: Explicit
Major Tags: Hospital AU, explicit sexual content
Summary: Bucky’s Wednesday wasn’t off to a great start. Not only did he wake up in a hospital with his annoyed best friend staring down at him, his treating Doctor just happened to be way too familiar, and the reason for that was slightly mortifying. With misunderstandings in the air, a snarky nurse who is a pain in his butt and the ugliest neck brace known to man attached to his body. There was no way his Wednesday was ever going to improve. Could it?
Word Count: 10,606
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Title: Stark Cattle Company: An Omegaverse AU - Chapter 2
Collaborator: lokivsanubis
Link: AO3
Square Filled: U4 - Entry
Ship: Stuckony
Rating: Mature
Major Tags: Interracial couples (Clint/Sam/Brock), Genderism/ alphaism/ omegaism (secondary gender discrimination)
Summary: Bucky comes to the ranch and Tony is quite displeased.
Word Count: 4180
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Title: Favorite Customer
Collaborator: plutosrose
Link: AO3
Square Filled: C4 - Bartender
Ship: Stucky
Rating: Explicit
Major Tags: Alternate Universe - Prohibition Era, Brief Non-Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Ableism, Brief Body Image Issues
Summary: Pierce’s club was located inside of Howard Stark’s hotel--all of his hotels had French names that Bucky had a hard time keeping straight--so the door never swung open dramatically. It was instead located off to the side of the entrance, so unobtrusive that most people missed the entrance to the club completely. But that moment was dramatic, because suddenly Natasha wasn’t the only beautiful person in the club anymore. - World War I vet Bucky Barnes works at Alexander Pierce's speakeasy. One night, Steve comes in to ask for a job.
Word Count: 2190
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Title: Soldier On
Collaborator: plutosrose
Link: AO3
Square Filled: K1 - “It Wasn’t Worth It”
Ship: Stucky
Rating: Teen
Major Tags: Alternate Scene, Light PTSD, Established Relationship, Bucky Barnes Recovering
Summary: Steve notices that Bucky's arm is causing him pain and gets Tony to work on it.
Word Count: 1560
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Title: Held Down
Collaborator: Avidreader6
Link: AO3
Square Filled: C1 - Kink: Held Down
Ship: SamBucky
Rating: Explicit
Major Tags: slightly PWP, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Teachers, Minor Natasha Romanov/Sam Wilson, Anal Sex
Summary: Bucky likes being held down during sex and he and Sam think they're ready for actual bonds, but are they?
Word Count: 1674
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Title: Knives and Pajamas
Collaborator: TiBun
Link: AO3
Square Filled: C4 - Terrible Choices
Ship: WinterHawk
Rating: Teen
Major Tags: first meetings, flirting, nudity
Summary: Clint is exhausted after a long mission; so what if there’s an assassin in his bedroom?
Word Count: 1970
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Title: Thirsty Thursday
Collaborator: plutosrose
Link: AO3
Square Filled: U5 - Comfort Clothes
Ship: Stucky
Rating: Explicit
Major Tags: slightly PWP, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Teachers, Minor Natasha Romanov/Sam Wilson, Anal Sex
Summary: Yes, Steve dressed like a walking Calvin Klein advertisement more days than he didn’t, but this was different. This was Fancy Restaurant Steve. This was Steve straight out of an incomprehensible Gucci ad. They weren’t going to make it to dinner, because as it turned out, Steve was so attractive that it was going to literally kill him before they got the chance to order appetizers.
Word Count: 1428
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Title: Thunder Witch
Collaborator: ariasfandom
Link: Tumblr
Square Filled: C1 - Thor
Ship: Bucky/Thor
Rating: Gen
Major Tags: AU, WinterThunder, Norse Bucky, moodboard
Summary: Instead of falling in New Mexico with Jane and Co., Thor falls in the hands (and heart) of Bucky Barnes, a witch who just so happened to study Norse mythology.
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Title: My fuckbuddy is Captain America and other reality-shattering revelations (that keep Bucky awake at night)
Collaborator: Minka
Link: AO3
Square Filled: Y1 - tension
Ship: Stucky
Rating: Explicit
Major Tags: Language and sex
Summary: “Late night infomercial Cap performer?” Bucky asked in one last, ditch-all effort to force this insanity to make sense. “Documentary reenactor?” Steve didn’t look amused, so Bucky took that as a no .------ When Bucky’s fuckbuddy (who is inexplicably nice to Bucky’s asshole of a cat) wants to attach strings to their relationship, a whole world of secrets trickle into the light of day. Including, but not limited to, Bucky’s love of vodka.
Word Count: 12,647
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Title: The Soldier and the Whore - part one and two
Collaborator: shakespeareanqueer
Link: Tumblr
Square Filled: B3 - RESCUE MISSION
Ship: Stucky/Reader
Rating: Teen
Major Tags: Mentions of starvation/emaciation, Hydra stuff, mentions of brainwashing/mind control
Summary: The Nomad Avengers find a strange and strangely beautiful woman in an abandoned Hydra compound. Who is she? Is she connected to Bucky?
Word Count: 3230
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Title: It's so Much More Exciting (to Look When You Can't Touch)
Collaborator: madrefiero
Link: AO3
Square Filled: B2 - Kink: Dirty Talk
Ship: Bucky/Clint/Steve
Rating: Explicit
Major Tags: explicit sexual content, voyeurism
Summary: As soon as Steve adjourned the meeting, they were both moving toward both the door and each other, completely uncaring that their teammates were still filing out. Bucky got to Clint first and slammed into him hard enough to knock him back against the wall. He was vaguely aware of Steve’s worried call of his name, and Natasha in motion in his peripheral vision, but only for as long as it took to push up on his toes and kiss Clint breathless. Half a second later Clint was braced against the wall, long legs wrapped around Bucky’s waist, holding him as close as he could. “Buck, what the hell?” “I swear to Christ, Stevie.” With an irritated growl, he pulled back from the kiss, swearing under his breath. “Look if you wanna watch me suck Barton’s dick, I’m more than okay with it unless he ain’t.”
Word Count: 2506
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Title: Freedom
Collaborator: writing-what-writing
Link: Tumblr
Square Filled: U4 - Classical Musician
Ship: none
Rating: Gen
Major Tags: moodboard, drabble
Summary: For Bucky Barnes Bingo. Square filled: U4 classical musician
Word Count: 100
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Title: An American Witch at Hogwarts - Chapter 4: Bucky Barnes
Collaborator: ibelieveinturtles
Link: AO3
Square Filled: C4 - Jarvis
Ship: Darcy Lewis/Brock Rumlow, Jane Foster/Loki, Christine Palmer/Bucky Barnes
Rating: Teen
Major Tags: Hogwarts AU
Summary: Witches and wizards from all over the world are gathering at Hogwarts for the Inaugeral Wizarding Olympics.
Word Count: 5091
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Title: Killer Dinner
Collaborator: hddnone
Link: Tumblr
Square Filled: U1 - Innocent until proven guilty
Ship: Bucky/Brock
Rating: Teen
Major Tags: Murderous impulses, drabble
Summary: Bucky wants to kill Brock.
Word Count: 100
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a dream of north
I don’t recall exactly when I first read Northern Lights by Philip Pullman. It must have been in the late 1990s, since I’m fairly sure it was after the release of the sequel, but definitely before The Amber Spyglass came out. (I was very excited for that one.) I would guess I was no more than twelve or thirteen. It seems a little odd now to think that initially these were promoted as books for young people. My edition was published by Point, the Scholastic imprint best known for pulpy teen horror fiction; in a bookshop today you are more likely to find a new edition of one of Pullman’s novels dressed up in handsome pastel colours, with a more ‘artisanal’ cover style. Which is fine, and well-deserved. But my copy is the same one I read more than twenty years ago; I know this because it is missing the top-right corner of the last thirty pages or so, having once been lovingly chewed by a late lamented family dog.
Northern Lights is not a long book, and in many ways it feels like a quick sketch of a fast-moving story, one which is touches lightly on the world in which it depicts. By the standards of genre fantasy or science fiction, there isn’t a lot of detail here. We follow Lyra, a young girl growing up in an alternate Oxford — it might be some time in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, by our standards. Through a combination of accident and concealed design, Lyra is drawn into a conspiracy that involves two aspects: an expedition to the distant arctic in search of a mysterious particle called ‘Dust’, and a conspiracy to kidnap children and transport them to this same far northern region. What follows is an adventure in pursuit of Lord Asriel, a man Lyra believes to be her uncle, while alternately monitored and pursued by a sinister rich woman called Mrs Coulter. This race to the frozen North forms pretty much all of the main body of the book.
For the most part it rolls along at a storytelling pace: one thing happens, then the next, then the next. It really does have the rhythm of a story one might tell out loud to children, over many bedtimes. (Consider the frequent asides about what Lyra must eat, and where she sleeps — so often a chapter will end with her curling up to sleep in some sheltered corner of a forsaken place.) It doesn’t come across as overly considered. With a few exceptions, the book doesn’t often slow down to explain itself. If a reader were so inclined I’m sure it would be possible to poke holes all kinds of holes in the plot. Even by the end of the novel I didn’t feel entirely sure what Dust was, nor did I really understand what the antagonists were trying to do with it. Are they trying to destroy it, or to control it? And some of it seems whimsical, in the best possible sense. Want a Texan cowboy with his own gas-powered balloon and a talking bear for a best friend? Why not? It’s fun. It may be whimsical but that isn’t to suggest it’s frivolous; the author’s imagination comes from a place of experience, from deep reading. It’s a world that fascinates, even as it seems to resist scrutiny.
Something else which surprised me on returning to this book was the near absence of any explicit references to organised religion. There are mentions of something called the Magisterium, but it’s far from clear what their role is in the story, while a passing mention of ‘Pope John Calvin’ seems like a sort of gentle joke for older readers. This seems significant because at a certain point after the final book in this series was released, public discussion of Philip Pullman’s work became centred around his attitude to organised religion. By then a new populist atheism was having a kind of resurgence — people were talking about ‘the New Humanism’ or ‘New Atheism’ as if it were something to be excited about. Pullman would be loosely associated with this movement, insofar as his books could be championed by people who might proactively define themselves as atheists.
But to the best of my knowledge, his statements on these matters have been altogether more measured, and less definitive. I’m curious now to revisit the later novels and consider the extent to which they really have much to do with atheism at all. It’s been a while, but it always seemed to me that the atheist reading was worth unpicking from the anti-religious impulse in these novels. There is a certain amount of what you might call ‘fantasy spectacle through hard science’ in Northern Lights — the many-worlds theory, the vague invocations of particle physics, all of which was so excitedly summarised by the New Atheism as the ‘wonder’ of the universe — and yet I’m not sure the novels are altogether so content to settle on a purely materialistic view of reality.
The big idea of Northern Lights is in the daemons. They are a beautiful idea, and the book’s story could easily be read as one long pursuit of this idea. What if every person was born with an animal companion which represented — no, which actually was — an indivisible part of their being? As if we all had another organ of personality, like a second brain or a second ‘heart’, linked to our bodies by an invisible thread. The notion has the genius quality of immediate appeal to all ages. Children (and many adults) love the idea of a permanent animal companion, while older readers may appreciate the associated philosophical concepts: the shadow self, or psychological anima; or just the little angel/devil on our shoulder.
Perhaps the existence of the daemons a kind of heresy, as much as it implies that each person’s soul (for want of a better word) belongs essentially to themselves. There are no refunds, and a daemon is not subject to exchange; a daemon is not the property of some other high power, gifted at birth and reclaimed at death; they might not even be properly said to belong to their ‘owner’, any more than their person-companion belongs to them. Still, in spiritual terms this might be characterised as a problem of accounting rather than of blasphemy. There is a lovely image presented early on of the crypts under one of the Oxford colleges, where great people are buried alongside precious tokens depicting the forms of their daemons. Even in death they belong to one another, though the account into which they have been deposited remains a mystery.
After the reader is introduced to the associated rituals and taboos, it is the pain of separation from one’s daemon that becomes a sort of leitmotif in this book. All this is expressed incredibly well — the sense of separation anxiety is perhaps the most memorable aspect of the whole story. It is unpleasant for one’s daemon to be handled by another person, and it is literal agony to be separated from it by more than a very short distance, and so when the reader discovers that children are being severed from their daemons it seems like an uniquely agonising kind of cruelty.
The allegories for this ‘cut’ are more explicit than I remember. At times it is directly compared to castration or genital mutilation. Lobotomy might be another comparison. The procedure seems to have a uniquely devastating effect on children — it seems that adults have undergone it without such dramatic effects — but as with much in this book, that much is never explained. Again, it’s unclear why the procedure is happening at all. Nobody seems to be gaining anything by it. It is like one of those pointless bleak cruelties we find in Roald Dahl. It’s something to do with Dust, we’re told, and it is dependent on the unique relationship that children have with their daemons before they reach puberty. But that it is hard to rationalise is, I think, part of the point.
Hanging over it all is the horror of institutionalised abuse. It is the kind of abuse that needs no justification, any more than senseless vivisection does. It is merely the pulling apart of a thing to see how it works – for the cutter, the gratuity is its own reward. Perhaps in so far as we can find any meaning in it, it’s in the idea that growing up needn’t involve a sort of deliberate caustic severing of whatever it was that made us childlike in the first place. We may not need to put away childish things, and we certainly don’t need them to be torn from us. Perhaps growing up should be less like a departure from ourselves and more like a process of reification, in which something that was latent all along only becomes settled and manifest with the passing of time.
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New Post has been published on https://fitnesshealthyoga.com/how-rosie-acosta-says-yoga-transformed-her-life/
How Rosie Acosta Says Yoga Transformed Her Life
Here’s how our December cover model, Rosie Acosta of the Radically Loved podcast, went from troubled teen to enlightened yogapreneur.
Ashley Turner
On a sunny afternoon in the Hollywood Hills, Rosie Acosta sits on the sofa in her bright living room, knees to her chest, facing best-selling author and Ayurveda practitioner Sahara Rose Ketabi. The two women are friends, and they’ve greeted each other warmly with hugs and excited chatter. They dish for a few minutes about Acosta’s herbal tea obsession and Ketabi’s recent engagement, but the pair have come together on official business—Ketabi is making a guest appearance on Acosta’s wellness podcast, Radically Loved, to discuss her new cookbook, Eat Feel Fresh, which features modern spins on traditional Ayurvedic recipes.
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Both Ayurveda enthusiasts, Acosta and Ketabi have recently returned from a six-day panchakarma, the most intense detoxification ritual in Ayurvedic medicine. The process consists of five aggressive therapies said to eliminate doshic imbalances in the body. (In Ayurveda, doshas are the three energies believed to govern physiological and mental activity.) To hear them describe it, it’s purging, pooping, and bathing in oil until you come out anew on the other side. Oh, and there’s a ton of ghee: “They put ghee in your eyes to clarify eyesight. They clean your ears with it,” Ketabi marvels. “I mean, there’s ghee in every crevice.”
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Of course there’s also meditation and self-reflection and carefully prepared Ayurvedic meals of kitchari (and more ghee), and it was during a panchakarma lunch that Ketabi discovered something rather radical about Acosta: “She’s literally a psychic guru,” she tells me.
See also How to Use Ayurveda to Get Healthier Every Time You Eat
Acosta and Ketabi swear it happened like this: They were at the panchakarma retreat with two other friends. It was a virechana day—designed to clear toxins from the GI tract. They all took laxatives and were confined to their individual rooms. Around three o’clock in the afternoon, Acosta took a nap. When she woke up at 4:30, she decided to meditate “for like, two hours straight,” she says, adding that it was the longest she’s ever sat for a meditation at one time. “I started to feel this weird thing happening—like an out-of-body experience,” she says. “All of a sudden, I wanted to go visit the girls and see what they were doing.”
Without leaving her room, still deep in meditation, Acosta checked in on her friends. She saw one of them curled up on her bed, naked, and lying on her left side. Another was propped up on her stomach, journaling. Acosta didn’t see Ketabi in her room at all. Instead, she envisioned the petite brunette at the gym, running on an elliptical, talking on her cell phone in Spanish (she’s fluent) to what sounded like a wedding planner. “At the end of the conversation she goes, ‘OK. ¡Hasta luego!’ And then hangs up,” Acosta recalls.
By the time Acosta met Ketabi for lunch the next day, she’d already confirmed with the other two women that her visions of them had, in fact, been accurate. But when she started telling Ketabi what had happened, things got even weirder. Ketabi had indeed been Skyping with her wedding photographer on an elliptical the day before, ending her conversation with the Spanish farewell hasta luego. “And I remember thinking after I hung up, That so did not sound like me. Why did I say that?” Ketabi says. “I sounded like an American trying to learn Spanish.” As they hashed out the events of the day before, they discovered that Acosta’s vision had actually occurred hours before Ketabi’s conversation with her photographer took place. “It’s like she put the words in my mouth,” Ketabi concludes.
We spent a week in Los Angeles with December cover model, Rosie Acosta of the Radically Loved Podcast. Here’s how yoga helped her transform a troubled adolescence into an abundant adulthood.
Christopher Dougherty
From rags to richness
At 35, Acosta has come to terms with supernatural phenomena such as clairvoyance and manifesting her deepest desires—in fact, she’s built her career in the yoga space by leaning into them. She believes that practicing gratitude and intense optimism (and living a life guided by the Yoga Sutra) can lead to dramatic transformation, because she’s experienced this herself. Today Acosta lives comfortably in a two-bedroom Craftsman overlooking Laurel Canyon with her fiancé, upscale-accessories designer Torry Pendergrass; her teenage sister, who was born when she was 15; and her two dogs. Acosta admits feeling extraordinarily lucky to be making a living teaching yoga and meditation in Los Angeles. Hosting self-discovery retreats and teacher trainings, plus inspirational speaking, keeps her constantly jet-setting—and her self-help-heavy podcast, in which she’s waxed poetic on topics ranging from the importance of forgiveness to the power of intention, has recently reached 120,000 followers. But things weren’t always coming up roses for Acosta, and there was a time not too long ago when she likened yoga to a cult.
See also Rosie Acosta on How to Take Down Your Inner Critic
After a tumultuous childhood growing up in South San Gabriel in East Los Angeles, Acosta suffered from depression, anxiety, and a binge-eating disorder throughout her late teens. With two immigrant parents (her mother from Spain and her father from Mexico) trying to make ends meet amid gang violence and the racist drug war that defined Los Angeles in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Acosta learned early on that there was a price to pay for being Latin American in her part of the world. “There was never any, ‘Oh, you have to grow up and go to school and have aspirations to be successful,” she recalls. “No. It was, ‘Your job is to stay alive.’”
Often referred to as the decade of death, 1988–1998 in Los Angeles County was marked by record homicide rates and violence. Gangs terrorized the neighborhoods surrounding Acosta’s home, where she lived with her parents, her older sister, and a revolving cast of extended relatives. One evening in March of ’88, Acosta’s 16-year-old uncle, charged with babysitting her and her cousin for the night, promised to take the pair of five-year-old girls to the arcade. Instead, he parked his black Camaro outside of Skateland U.S.A., a roller rink by day, music venue by night, that’s notable for launching hip-hop supergroup N.W.A. The concrete depot on Central Avenue in Compton was situated deep in Bloods territory, and although a sign reading NO CAPS — NO COLORS adorned the entry door, the crowd was frequently a stormy sea of red. Peering out from the back seat of the Camaro, Acosta could see a gaggle of high schoolers and gangbangers drinking and shouting in the noisy lot. “Wait in the car,” her uncle told her. “I’m just gonna go watch this show, and then I’ll be right back.” An early N.W.A. fan, her uncle had brought her to the controversial rap group’s now-legendary first performance, immortalized in the 2015 biopic Straight Outta Compton.
“He left, and we just looked at each other, so freaked out,” Acosta recalls. The girls hid under a Saltillo blanket as violence erupted outside—until their uncle emerged, hours later, with a bloody face and a busted left eye. “I still have no idea how that happened, but then nobody asked him,” Acosta recalls. “He was like, ‘We were at the arcade,’ and my parents were like, ‘OK.’ It was literally like Lord of the Flies, you know?”
Exactly 10 years later, in the spring of 1998, Acosta sat in the driver’s seat of a running cop car, surrounded by six or seven officers with their guns drawn, all screaming for her to get out of the car. She was a sophomore at Mark Keppel High School, and she and some friends had decided to ditch sixth period to hang out at Sierra Vista Park in northeast LA. The small grassy park is home to a basketball court and a primary-colored playground, and while the teens were en route, a car chase was going down nearby. A police car had been in pursuit of a red Honda Prelude when both cars screeched to a halt at the edge of the park. The chase continued on foot—the abandoned vehicles left running on the pavement. “I was like Dora the Explorer, looking in both cars, trying to be a badass because all these people were watching,” says Acosta. “And someone was like, ‘Oh, you should get into the cop car.’” Clad in fingerless panda-print gloves and a chunky black sweater, Acosta hopped into the front seat, unaware that the place was crawling with undercover cops. The incident resulted in her arrest for attempted grand theft auto.
After several traumatic events growing up, Rosie realized she needed to change the direction her life was headed.
Christopher Dougherty
Rosie from the block
Ventura Boulevard is humming with hipsters as Acosta and I sit beneath a bright-blue umbrella, amid teal bistro tables, outside Australian-inspired coffee shop Bluestone Lane. The chain is new to LA, and Acosta is hoping this outpost will be as good as the one she frequents in New York City. We both order avocado toast, and over coffee and matcha discuss her forthcoming memoir and how she came to find yoga. She’s animated and easy to talk to, with an attitude and mannerisms that are a little bit JLo. (Case in point, as Ketabi walked out the door at the end of her podcast recording session with Acosta, she turned to me and said, “The way I’m envisioning the [YJ] cover is, she’s wearing little pigtails on her head, like buns. And she’s doing a handstand on one hand. And wearing those pants that have the straps, but instead of ‘Calvin Klein’ it says, ‘Rosie from the Block’”—a direct reference to the 2002 Jennifer Lopez chart topper “Jenny from the Block.”) In short, Acosta is the real deal, and she practices what she preaches because she believes it saved her life.
Acosta tells me that if she hadn’t been booked that day in 1998, things may not have turned around quite like they have. Traumatic episodes such as the one that unfolded at the N.W.A. concert colored her childhood, and it was only after her arrest that she was truly able to reflect on how her upbringing was wreaking havoc on her adolescence. Living through a never-ending reel of teen deaths, hold-ups at grocery stores, and other violent scenarios eventually led to debilitating panic attacks, depression, and other symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. And after her arrest, court-ordered probation meant she could no longer cut school to blow off steam with her friends, most of whom were on a similar path of self-destruction. Discovering meditation and self-inquiry, plus a dramatic shift in attitude, is what revealed to her that she didn’t have to buy into what other people expected of her, which by her account, wasn’t much. “Nobody around us was trying to cultivate growth of any kind,” she says. “For me, the unpopular decision was to succeed. It’s fucked up, but the unpopular vote was to move out of my environment and become something else.”
During her senior year of high school, her mom, who supervised the cleaning staff at a local hospital, returned one night from work with some literature for the Self-Realization Fellowship temple in Hollywood—a white-stucco sanctuary with gold architectural embellishments and arched stained-glass windows—founded by Paramahansa Yogananda, an Indian yogi often credited with helping bring meditation and Kriya Yoga to the West.
“My mom said, ‘Hey, one of the ladies at work says she was stressed out and meditation worked for her—you should try it,’” recalls Acosta. “I took the little pamphlets, and I started to read about affirmations, and meditation, and manifestation, and the Law of Attraction, and all these things, and I really liked it. I was like, Oh, it’s like magic.”
But when she showed up at the temple a few weeks later, it wasn’t exactly love at first sight: “I was like, ‘This is a fucking cult. Get me out of here,’” she says. Even so, something about the lecture she heard that day resonated with her deep down, and she decided to stick with it. “The sermon was about how we were responsible for our own happiness,” Acosta says. “That really caught my attention, because I was like, Whoa, whoa, what does that mean? I was having this spiritual awakening of sorts, and it really spoke to me—this idea that I needed to be responsible for creating the life I wanted. I needed to be the person who rectified my bad behavior,” she says. “Somebody else couldn’t do that for me.”
Gradually, the path toward yoga revealed itself. When Acosta was 22, she grew interested in the physical aspects of the yogic lifestyle she was beginning to adopt, and she decided to attend a teacher training that, she would later come to realize, was unconventional, to say the least. “I found this little Kundalini Yoga studio in Pasadena that offered a weekend-long immersive training led by this sweet couple,” she says. As it turned out, they were followers of Osho, the controversial leader of the Rajneesh movement, recently popularized by the Netflix documentary series Wild Wild Country. “They had Osho posters everywhere,” Acosta recalls. “I took away a ton of information, but I remember thinking, There’s no way I can teach yoga. But after that, yoga started becoming more of a daily practice.”
She began regularly frequenting the Center for Yoga (now YogaWorks) and attending workshops and 200-hour teacher trainings with the intention of both deepening her practice and eventually becoming a yoga teacher. Yoga was where everything made sense, she says.
Rod Stryker, the founder of ParaYoga who became Acosta’s teacher in 2011, was surprised to learn of the adversity Acosta overcame to become the warm and wise yogi she is today. He says of their early days together: “I didn’t hear anything about hardship. I experienced this amazingly present, vibrant, mature, full soul.” But Acosta says that when she started studying with Stryker (her favorite teacher was a student of his, and encouraged Acosta to try his class), she had really only just begun her journey into yoga. “Things were resonating, but I couldn’t put the pieces together. It was like having a compass, and seeing signs—just trying to figure out how to bring all the clues together,” she says.
Rosie encourages students to commit to their own ability and potential while not comparing themselves to others.
Ashley Turner
Reflections from the other side
Today, after seven years of Stryker’s tutelage, Acosta certainly appears to have found her way. She teaches her own students at Wanderlust Hollywood and the newly opened Den Meditation studio, and recently, she and Pendergrass have been talking about starting a family of their own. The lessons she imparts on her students she’s learned from Stryker and from her own transformation. First and foremost, “practice for a long period of time without interruption and with an attitude of service”—wisdom from Patanjali (author of the Yoga Sutra) that’s so important today, she says, when most of us can’t even read an email on the computer without reaching for our phone. “I always say, this is a marathon, not a sprint. There are no freeways to enlightenment,” she says. The other mainstay of her teaching is something she’s gleaned from her own life: Commit to your own ability and your own potential, and quit comparing yourself to others. “Devote yourself to your own gifts and you’ll achieve success,” she says. “And remember that it’s going to look different from everyone else’s, because it’s supposed to.”
From the Mulholland Drive Scenic Overlook, where Acosta takes me one blistering-hot LA afternoon, we can see the entire metropolis sprawled out in front of us. She points out where she grew up, all the way on the right, the East side of the horizon. She recalls how she used to skip school and take the bus to downtown, then hike all the way up here and imagine what life would look like on the other side of the city—the life she’s living today, as if deep down, she knew what it would be like all along. “One of my girlfriends, she wanted to be an actress,” she recalls. “So she’d say things like, ‘I’m going to buy that house over there and be famous.’ But for me, any time I had to think of what my life might look like if it were something else, I would stay quiet. I didn’t have a vision of a career, per se, but I had a vision of what I wanted to see. And it was this.”
See also Doshas Decoded: Learn About Your Unique Mind & Body Type
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Asana and meditation teacher and popular podcast personality Rosie Acosta says yoga and a sunny outlook saved her life. Here’s how.
Here’s how our December cover model, Rosie Acosta of the Radically Loved podcast, went from troubled teen to enlightened yogapreneur.
On a sunny afternoon in the Hollywood Hills, Rosie Acosta sits on the sofa in her bright living room, knees to her chest, facing best-selling author and Ayurveda practitioner Sahara Rose Ketabi. The two women are friends, and they’ve greeted each other warmly with hugs and excited chatter. They dish for a few minutes about Acosta’s herbal tea obsession and Ketabi’s recent engagement, but the pair have come together on official business—Ketabi is making a guest appearance on Acosta’s wellness podcast, Radically Loved, to discuss her new cookbook, Eat Feel Fresh, which features modern spins on traditional Ayurvedic recipes.
Both Ayurveda enthusiasts, Acosta and Ketabi have recently returned from a six-day panchakarma, the most intense detoxification ritual in Ayurvedic medicine. The process consists of five aggressive therapies said to eliminate doshic imbalances in the body. (In Ayurveda, doshas are the three energies believed to govern physiological and mental activity.) To hear them describe it, it’s purging, pooping, and bathing in oil until you come out anew on the other side. Oh, and there’s a ton of ghee: “They put ghee in your eyes to clarify eyesight. They clean your ears with it,” Ketabi marvels. “I mean, there’s ghee in every crevice.”
Of course there’s also meditation and self-reflection and carefully prepared Ayurvedic meals of kitchari (and more ghee), and it was during a panchakarma lunch that Ketabi discovered something rather radical about Acosta: “She’s literally a psychic guru,” she tells me.
See also How to Use Ayurveda to Get Healthier Every Time You Eat
Acosta and Ketabi swear it happened like this: They were at the panchakarma retreat with two other friends. It was a virechana day—designed to clear toxins from the GI tract. They all took laxatives and were confined to their individual rooms. Around three o’clock in the afternoon, Acosta took a nap. When she woke up at 4:30, she decided to meditate “for like, two hours straight,” she says, adding that it was the longest she’s ever sat for a meditation at one time. “I started to feel this weird thing happening—like an out-of-body experience,” she says. “All of a sudden, I wanted to go visit the girls and see what they were doing.”
Without leaving her room, still deep in meditation, Acosta checked in on her friends. She saw one of them curled up on her bed, naked, and lying on her left side. Another was propped up on her stomach, journaling. Acosta didn’t see Ketabi in her room at all. Instead, she envisioned the petite brunette at the gym, running on an elliptical, talking on her cell phone in Spanish (she’s fluent) to what sounded like a wedding planner. “At the end of the conversation she goes, ‘OK. ¡Hasta luego!’ And then hangs up,” Acosta recalls.
By the time Acosta met Ketabi for lunch the next day, she’d already confirmed with the other two women that her visions of them had, in fact, been accurate. But when she started telling Ketabi what had happened, things got even weirder. Ketabi had indeed been Skyping with her wedding photographer on an elliptical the day before, ending her conversation with the Spanish farewell hasta luego. “And I remember thinking after I hung up, That so did not sound like me. Why did I say that?” Ketabi says. “I sounded like an American trying to learn Spanish.” As they hashed out the events of the day before, they discovered that Acosta’s vision had actually occurred hours before Ketabi’s conversation with her photographer took place. “It’s like she put the words in my mouth,” Ketabi concludes.
We spent a week in Los Angeles with December cover model, Rosie Acosta of the Radically Loved Podcast. Here’s how yoga helped her transform a troubled adolescence into an abundant adulthood.
From rags to richness
At 35, Acosta has come to terms with supernatural phenomena such as clairvoyance and manifesting her deepest desires—in fact, she’s built her career in the yoga space by leaning into them. She believes that practicing gratitude and intense optimism (and living a life guided by the Yoga Sutra) can lead to dramatic transformation, because she’s experienced this herself. Today Acosta lives comfortably in a two-bedroom Craftsman overlooking Laurel Canyon with her fiancé, upscale-accessories designer Torry Pendergrass; her teenage sister, who was born when she was 15; and her two dogs. Acosta admits feeling extraordinarily lucky to be making a living teaching yoga and meditation in Los Angeles. Hosting self-discovery retreats and teacher trainings, plus inspirational speaking, keeps her constantly jet-setting—and her self-help-heavy podcast, in which she’s waxed poetic on topics ranging from the importance of forgiveness to the power of intention, has recently reached 120,000 followers. But things weren’t always coming up roses for Acosta, and there was a time not too long ago when she likened yoga to a cult.
See also Rosie Acosta on How to Take Down Your Inner Critic
After a tumultuous childhood growing up in South San Gabriel in East Los Angeles, Acosta suffered from depression, anxiety, and a binge-eating disorder throughout her late teens. With two immigrant parents (her mother from Spain and her father from Mexico) trying to make ends meet amid gang violence and the racist drug war that defined Los Angeles in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Acosta learned early on that there was a price to pay for being Latin American in her part of the world. “There was never any, ‘Oh, you have to grow up and go to school and have aspirations to be successful,” she recalls. “No. It was, ‘Your job is to stay alive.’”
Often referred to as the decade of death, 1988–1998 in Los Angeles County was marked by record homicide rates and violence. Gangs terrorized the neighborhoods surrounding Acosta’s home, where she lived with her parents, her older sister, and a revolving cast of extended relatives. One evening in March of ’88, Acosta’s 16-year-old uncle, charged with babysitting her and her cousin for the night, promised to take the pair of five-year-old girls to the arcade. Instead, he parked his black Camaro outside of Skateland U.S.A., a roller rink by day, music venue by night, that’s notable for launching hip-hop supergroup N.W.A. The concrete depot on Central Avenue in Compton was situated deep in Bloods territory, and although a sign reading NO CAPS — NO COLORS adorned the entry door, the crowd was frequently a stormy sea of red. Peering out from the back seat of the Camaro, Acosta could see a gaggle of high schoolers and gangbangers drinking and shouting in the noisy lot. “Wait in the car,” her uncle told her. “I’m just gonna go watch this show, and then I’ll be right back.” An early N.W.A. fan, her uncle had brought her to the controversial rap group’s now-legendary first performance, immortalized in the 2015 biopic Straight Outta Compton.
“He left, and we just looked at each other, so freaked out,” Acosta recalls. The girls hid under a Saltillo blanket as violence erupted outside—until their uncle emerged, hours later, with a bloody face and a busted left eye. “I still have no idea how that happened, but then nobody asked him,” Acosta recalls. “He was like, ‘We were at the arcade,’ and my parents were like, ‘OK.’ It was literally like Lord of the Flies, you know?”
Exactly 10 years later, in the spring of 1998, Acosta sat in the driver’s seat of a running cop car, surrounded by six or seven officers with their guns drawn, all screaming for her to get out of the car. She was a sophomore at Mark Keppel High School, and she and some friends had decided to ditch sixth period to hang out at Sierra Vista Park in northeast LA. The small grassy park is home to a basketball court and a primary-colored playground, and while the teens were en route, a car chase was going down nearby. A police car had been in pursuit of a red Honda Prelude when both cars screeched to a halt at the edge of the park. The chase continued on foot—the abandoned vehicles left running on the pavement. “I was like Dora the Explorer, looking in both cars, trying to be a badass because all these people were watching,” says Acosta. “And someone was like, ‘Oh, you should get into the cop car.’” Clad in fingerless panda-print gloves and a chunky black sweater, Acosta hopped into the front seat, unaware that the place was crawling with undercover cops. The incident resulted in her arrest for attempted grand theft auto.
After several traumatic events growing up, Rosie realized she needed to change the direction her life was headed.
Rosie from the block
Ventura Boulevard is humming with hipsters as Acosta and I sit beneath a bright-blue umbrella, amid teal bistro tables, outside Australian-inspired coffee shop Bluestone Lane. The chain is new to LA, and Acosta is hoping this outpost will be as good as the one she frequents in New York City. We both order avocado toast, and over coffee and matcha discuss her forthcoming memoir and how she came to find yoga. She’s animated and easy to talk to, with an attitude and mannerisms that are a little bit JLo. (Case in point, as Ketabi walked out the door at the end of her podcast recording session with Acosta, she turned to me and said, “The way I’m envisioning the [YJ] cover is, she’s wearing little pigtails on her head, like buns. And she’s doing a handstand on one hand. And wearing those pants that have the straps, but instead of ‘Calvin Klein’ it says, ‘Rosie from the Block’”—a direct reference to the 2002 Jennifer Lopez chart topper “Jenny from the Block.”) In short, Acosta is the real deal, and she practices what she preaches because she believes it saved her life.
Acosta tells me that if she hadn’t been booked that day in 1998, things may not have turned around quite like they have. Traumatic episodes such as the one that unfolded at the N.W.A. concert colored her childhood, and it was only after her arrest that she was truly able to reflect on how her upbringing was wreaking havoc on her adolescence. Living through a never-ending reel of teen deaths, hold-ups at grocery stores, and other violent scenarios eventually led to debilitating panic attacks, depression, and other symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. And after her arrest, court-ordered probation meant she could no longer cut school to blow off steam with her friends, most of whom were on a similar path of self-destruction. Discovering meditation and self-inquiry, plus a dramatic shift in attitude, is what revealed to her that she didn’t have to buy into what other people expected of her, which by her account, wasn’t much. “Nobody around us was trying to cultivate growth of any kind,” she says. “For me, the unpopular decision was to succeed. It’s fucked up, but the unpopular vote was to move out of my environment and become something else.”
During her senior year of high school, her mom, who supervised the cleaning staff at a local hospital, returned one night from work with some literature for the Self-Realization Fellowship temple in Hollywood—a white-stucco sanctuary with gold architectural embellishments and arched stained-glass windows—founded by Paramahansa Yogananda, an Indian yogi often credited with helping bring meditation and Kriya Yoga to the West.
“My mom said, ‘Hey, one of the ladies at work says she was stressed out and meditation worked for her—you should try it,’” recalls Acosta. “I took the little pamphlets, and I started to read about affirmations, and meditation, and manifestation, and the Law of Attraction, and all these things, and I really liked it. I was like, Oh, it’s like magic.”
But when she showed up at the temple a few weeks later, it wasn’t exactly love at first sight: “I was like, ‘This is a fucking cult. Get me out of here,’” she says. Even so, something about the lecture she heard that day resonated with her deep down, and she decided to stick with it. “The sermon was about how we were responsible for our own happiness,” Acosta says. “That really caught my attention, because I was like, Whoa, whoa, what does that mean? I was having this spiritual awakening of sorts, and it really spoke to me—this idea that I needed to be responsible for creating the life I wanted. I needed to be the person who rectified my bad behavior,” she says. “Somebody else couldn’t do that for me.”
Gradually, the path toward yoga revealed itself. When Acosta was 22, she grew interested in the physical aspects of the yogic lifestyle she was beginning to adopt, and she decided to attend a teacher training that, she would later come to realize, was unconventional, to say the least. “I found this little Kundalini Yoga studio in Pasadena that offered a weekend-long immersive training led by this sweet couple,” she says. As it turned out, they were followers of Osho, the controversial leader of the Rajneesh movement, recently popularized by the Netflix documentary series Wild Wild Country. “They had Osho posters everywhere,” Acosta recalls. “I took away a ton of information, but I remember thinking, There’s no way I can teach yoga. But after that, yoga started becoming more of a daily practice.”
She began regularly frequenting the Center for Yoga (now YogaWorks) and attending workshops and 200-hour teacher trainings with the intention of both deepening her practice and eventually becoming a yoga teacher. Yoga was where everything made sense, she says.
Rod Stryker, the founder of ParaYoga who became Acosta’s teacher in 2011, was surprised to learn of the adversity Acosta overcame to become the warm and wise yogi she is today. He says of their early days together: “I didn’t hear anything about hardship. I experienced this amazingly present, vibrant, mature, full soul.” But Acosta says that when she started studying with Stryker (her favorite teacher was a student of his, and encouraged Acosta to try his class), she had really only just begun her journey into yoga. “Things were resonating, but I couldn’t put the pieces together. It was like having a compass, and seeing signs—just trying to figure out how to bring all the clues together,” she says.
Rosie encourages students to commit to their own ability and potential while not comparing themselves to others.
Reflections from the other side
Today, after seven years of Stryker’s tutelage, Acosta certainly appears to have found her way. She teaches her own students at Wanderlust Hollywood and the newly opened Den Meditation studio, and recently, she and Pendergrass have been talking about starting a family of their own. The lessons she imparts on her students she’s learned from Stryker and from her own transformation. First and foremost, “practice for a long period of time without interruption and with an attitude of service”—wisdom from Patanjali (author of the Yoga Sutra) that’s so important today, she says, when most of us can’t even read an email on the computer without reaching for our phone. “I always say, this is a marathon, not a sprint. There are no freeways to enlightenment,” she says. The other mainstay of her teaching is something she’s gleaned from her own life: Commit to your own ability and your own potential, and quit comparing yourself to others. “Devote yourself to your own gifts and you’ll achieve success,” she says. “And remember that it’s going to look different from everyone else’s, because it’s supposed to.”
From the Mulholland Drive Scenic Overlook, where Acosta takes me one blistering-hot LA afternoon, we can see the entire metropolis sprawled out in front of us. She points out where she grew up, all the way on the right, the East side of the horizon. She recalls how she used to skip school and take the bus to downtown, then hike all the way up here and imagine what life would look like on the other side of the city—the life she’s living today, as if deep down, she knew what it would be like all along. “One of my girlfriends, she wanted to be an actress,” she recalls. “So she’d say things like, ‘I’m going to buy that house over there and be famous.’ But for me, any time I had to think of what my life might look like if it were something else, I would stay quiet. I didn’t have a vision of a career, per se, but I had a vision of what I wanted to see. And it was this.”
See also Doshas Decoded: Learn About Your Unique Mind & Body Type
0 notes
Link
Asana and meditation teacher and popular podcast personality Rosie Acosta says yoga and a sunny outlook saved her life. Here’s how.
Here’s how our December cover model, Rosie Acosta of the Radically Loved podcast, went from troubled teen to enlightened yogapreneur.
On a sunny afternoon in the Hollywood Hills, Rosie Acosta sits on the sofa in her bright living room, knees to her chest, facing best-selling author and Ayurveda practitioner Sahara Rose Ketabi. The two women are friends, and they’ve greeted each other warmly with hugs and excited chatter. They dish for a few minutes about Acosta’s herbal tea obsession and Ketabi’s recent engagement, but the pair have come together on official business—Ketabi is making a guest appearance on Acosta’s wellness podcast, Radically Loved, to discuss her new cookbook, Eat Feel Fresh, which features modern spins on traditional Ayurvedic recipes.
Both Ayurveda enthusiasts, Acosta and Ketabi have recently returned from a six-day panchakarma, the most intense detoxification ritual in Ayurvedic medicine. The process consists of five aggressive therapies said to eliminate doshic imbalances in the body. (In Ayurveda, doshas are the three energies believed to govern physiological and mental activity.) To hear them describe it, it’s purging, pooping, and bathing in oil until you come out anew on the other side. Oh, and there’s a ton of ghee: “They put ghee in your eyes to clarify eyesight. They clean your ears with it,” Ketabi marvels. “I mean, there’s ghee in every crevice.”
Of course there’s also meditation and self-reflection and carefully prepared Ayurvedic meals of kitchari (and more ghee), and it was during a panchakarma lunch that Ketabi discovered something rather radical about Acosta: “She’s literally a psychic guru,” she tells me.
See also How to Use Ayurveda to Get Healthier Every Time You Eat
Acosta and Ketabi swear it happened like this: They were at the panchakarma retreat with two other friends. It was a virechana day—designed to clear toxins from the GI tract. They all took laxatives and were confined to their individual rooms. Around three o’clock in the afternoon, Acosta took a nap. When she woke up at 4:30, she decided to meditate “for like, two hours straight,” she says, adding that it was the longest she’s ever sat for a meditation at one time. “I started to feel this weird thing happening—like an out-of-body experience,” she says. “All of a sudden, I wanted to go visit the girls and see what they were doing.”
Without leaving her room, still deep in meditation, Acosta checked in on her friends. She saw one of them curled up on her bed, naked, and lying on her left side. Another was propped up on her stomach, journaling. Acosta didn’t see Ketabi in her room at all. Instead, she envisioned the petite brunette at the gym, running on an elliptical, talking on her cell phone in Spanish (she’s fluent) to what sounded like a wedding planner. “At the end of the conversation she goes, ‘OK. ¡Hasta luego!’ And then hangs up,” Acosta recalls.
By the time Acosta met Ketabi for lunch the next day, she’d already confirmed with the other two women that her visions of them had, in fact, been accurate. But when she started telling Ketabi what had happened, things got even weirder. Ketabi had indeed been Skyping with her wedding photographer on an elliptical the day before, ending her conversation with the Spanish farewell hasta luego. “And I remember thinking after I hung up, That so did not sound like me. Why did I say that?” Ketabi says. “I sounded like an American trying to learn Spanish.” As they hashed out the events of the day before, they discovered that Acosta’s vision had actually occurred hours before Ketabi’s conversation with her photographer took place. “It’s like she put the words in my mouth,” Ketabi concludes.
We spent a week in Los Angeles with December cover model, Rosie Acosta of the Radically Loved Podcast. Here’s how yoga helped her transform a troubled adolescence into an abundant adulthood.
From rags to richness
At 35, Acosta has come to terms with supernatural phenomena such as clairvoyance and manifesting her deepest desires—in fact, she’s built her career in the yoga space by leaning into them. She believes that practicing gratitude and intense optimism (and living a life guided by the Yoga Sutra) can lead to dramatic transformation, because she’s experienced this herself. Today Acosta lives comfortably in a two-bedroom Craftsman overlooking Laurel Canyon with her fiancé, upscale-accessories designer Torry Pendergrass; her teenage sister, who was born when she was 15; and her two dogs. Acosta admits feeling extraordinarily lucky to be making a living teaching yoga and meditation in Los Angeles. Hosting self-discovery retreats and teacher trainings, plus inspirational speaking, keeps her constantly jet-setting—and her self-help-heavy podcast, in which she’s waxed poetic on topics ranging from the importance of forgiveness to the power of intention, has recently reached 120,000 followers. But things weren’t always coming up roses for Acosta, and there was a time not too long ago when she likened yoga to a cult.
See also Rosie Acosta on How to Take Down Your Inner Critic
After a tumultuous childhood growing up in South San Gabriel in East Los Angeles, Acosta suffered from depression, anxiety, and a binge-eating disorder throughout her late teens. With two immigrant parents (her mother from Spain and her father from Mexico) trying to make ends meet amid gang violence and the racist drug war that defined Los Angeles in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Acosta learned early on that there was a price to pay for being Latin American in her part of the world. “There was never any, ‘Oh, you have to grow up and go to school and have aspirations to be successful,” she recalls. “No. It was, ‘Your job is to stay alive.’”
Often referred to as the decade of death, 1988–1998 in Los Angeles County was marked by record homicide rates and violence. Gangs terrorized the neighborhoods surrounding Acosta’s home, where she lived with her parents, her older sister, and a revolving cast of extended relatives. One evening in March of ’88, Acosta’s 16-year-old uncle, charged with babysitting her and her cousin for the night, promised to take the pair of five-year-old girls to the arcade. Instead, he parked his black Camaro outside of Skateland U.S.A., a roller rink by day, music venue by night, that’s notable for launching hip-hop supergroup N.W.A. The concrete depot on Central Avenue in Compton was situated deep in Bloods territory, and although a sign reading NO CAPS — NO COLORS adorned the entry door, the crowd was frequently a stormy sea of red. Peering out from the back seat of the Camaro, Acosta could see a gaggle of high schoolers and gangbangers drinking and shouting in the noisy lot. “Wait in the car,” her uncle told her. “I’m just gonna go watch this show, and then I’ll be right back.” An early N.W.A. fan, her uncle had brought her to the controversial rap group’s now-legendary first performance, immortalized in the 2015 biopic Straight Outta Compton.
“He left, and we just looked at each other, so freaked out,” Acosta recalls. The girls hid under a Saltillo blanket as violence erupted outside—until their uncle emerged, hours later, with a bloody face and a busted left eye. “I still have no idea how that happened, but then nobody asked him,” Acosta recalls. “He was like, ‘We were at the arcade,’ and my parents were like, ‘OK.’ It was literally like Lord of the Flies, you know?”
Exactly 10 years later, in the spring of 1998, Acosta sat in the driver’s seat of a running cop car, surrounded by six or seven officers with their guns drawn, all screaming for her to get out of the car. She was a sophomore at Mark Keppel High School, and she and some friends had decided to ditch sixth period to hang out at Sierra Vista Park in northeast LA. The small grassy park is home to a basketball court and a primary-colored playground, and while the teens were en route, a car chase was going down nearby. A police car had been in pursuit of a red Honda Prelude when both cars screeched to a halt at the edge of the park. The chase continued on foot—the abandoned vehicles left running on the pavement. “I was like Dora the Explorer, looking in both cars, trying to be a badass because all these people were watching,” says Acosta. “And someone was like, ‘Oh, you should get into the cop car.’” Clad in fingerless panda-print gloves and a chunky black sweater, Acosta hopped into the front seat, unaware that the place was crawling with undercover cops. The incident resulted in her arrest for attempted grand theft auto.
After several traumatic events growing up, Rosie realized she needed to change the direction her life was headed.
Rosie from the block
Ventura Boulevard is humming with hipsters as Acosta and I sit beneath a bright-blue umbrella, amid teal bistro tables, outside Australian-inspired coffee shop Bluestone Lane. The chain is new to LA, and Acosta is hoping this outpost will be as good as the one she frequents in New York City. We both order avocado toast, and over coffee and matcha discuss her forthcoming memoir and how she came to find yoga. She’s animated and easy to talk to, with an attitude and mannerisms that are a little bit JLo. (Case in point, as Ketabi walked out the door at the end of her podcast recording session with Acosta, she turned to me and said, “The way I’m envisioning the [YJ] cover is, she’s wearing little pigtails on her head, like buns. And she’s doing a handstand on one hand. And wearing those pants that have the straps, but instead of ‘Calvin Klein’ it says, ‘Rosie from the Block’”—a direct reference to the 2002 Jennifer Lopez chart topper “Jenny from the Block.”) In short, Acosta is the real deal, and she practices what she preaches because she believes it saved her life.
Acosta tells me that if she hadn’t been booked that day in 1998, things may not have turned around quite like they have. Traumatic episodes such as the one that unfolded at the N.W.A. concert colored her childhood, and it was only after her arrest that she was truly able to reflect on how her upbringing was wreaking havoc on her adolescence. Living through a never-ending reel of teen deaths, hold-ups at grocery stores, and other violent scenarios eventually led to debilitating panic attacks, depression, and other symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. And after her arrest, court-ordered probation meant she could no longer cut school to blow off steam with her friends, most of whom were on a similar path of self-destruction. Discovering meditation and self-inquiry, plus a dramatic shift in attitude, is what revealed to her that she didn’t have to buy into what other people expected of her, which by her account, wasn’t much. “Nobody around us was trying to cultivate growth of any kind,” she says. “For me, the unpopular decision was to succeed. It’s fucked up, but the unpopular vote was to move out of my environment and become something else.”
During her senior year of high school, her mom, who supervised the cleaning staff at a local hospital, returned one night from work with some literature for the Self-Realization Fellowship temple in Hollywood—a white-stucco sanctuary with gold architectural embellishments and arched stained-glass windows—founded by Paramahansa Yogananda, an Indian yogi often credited with helping bring meditation and Kriya Yoga to the West.
“My mom said, ‘Hey, one of the ladies at work says she was stressed out and meditation worked for her—you should try it,’” recalls Acosta. “I took the little pamphlets, and I started to read about affirmations, and meditation, and manifestation, and the Law of Attraction, and all these things, and I really liked it. I was like, Oh, it’s like magic.”
But when she showed up at the temple a few weeks later, it wasn’t exactly love at first sight: “I was like, ‘This is a fucking cult. Get me out of here,’” she says. Even so, something about the lecture she heard that day resonated with her deep down, and she decided to stick with it. “The sermon was about how we were responsible for our own happiness,” Acosta says. “That really caught my attention, because I was like, Whoa, whoa, what does that mean? I was having this spiritual awakening of sorts, and it really spoke to me—this idea that I needed to be responsible for creating the life I wanted. I needed to be the person who rectified my bad behavior,” she says. “Somebody else couldn’t do that for me.”
Gradually, the path toward yoga revealed itself. When Acosta was 22, she grew interested in the physical aspects of the yogic lifestyle she was beginning to adopt, and she decided to attend a teacher training that, she would later come to realize, was unconventional, to say the least. “I found this little Kundalini Yoga studio in Pasadena that offered a weekend-long immersive training led by this sweet couple,” she says. As it turned out, they were followers of Osho, the controversial leader of the Rajneesh movement, recently popularized by the Netflix documentary series Wild Wild Country. “They had Osho posters everywhere,” Acosta recalls. “I took away a ton of information, but I remember thinking, There’s no way I can teach yoga. But after that, yoga started becoming more of a daily practice.”
She began regularly frequenting the Center for Yoga (now YogaWorks) and attending workshops and 200-hour teacher trainings with the intention of both deepening her practice and eventually becoming a yoga teacher. Yoga was where everything made sense, she says.
Rod Stryker, the founder of ParaYoga who became Acosta’s teacher in 2011, was surprised to learn of the adversity Acosta overcame to become the warm and wise yogi she is today. He says of their early days together: “I didn’t hear anything about hardship. I experienced this amazingly present, vibrant, mature, full soul.” But Acosta says that when she started studying with Stryker (her favorite teacher was a student of his, and encouraged Acosta to try his class), she had really only just begun her journey into yoga. “Things were resonating, but I couldn’t put the pieces together. It was like having a compass, and seeing signs—just trying to figure out how to bring all the clues together,” she says.
Rosie encourages students to commit to their own ability and potential while not comparing themselves to others.
Reflections from the other side
Today, after seven years of Stryker’s tutelage, Acosta certainly appears to have found her way. She teaches her own students at Wanderlust Hollywood and the newly opened Den Meditation studio, and recently, she and Pendergrass have been talking about starting a family of their own. The lessons she imparts on her students she’s learned from Stryker and from her own transformation. First and foremost, “practice for a long period of time without interruption and with an attitude of service”—wisdom from Patanjali (author of the Yoga Sutra) that’s so important today, she says, when most of us can’t even read an email on the computer without reaching for our phone. “I always say, this is a marathon, not a sprint. There are no freeways to enlightenment,” she says. The other mainstay of her teaching is something she’s gleaned from her own life: Commit to your own ability and your own potential, and quit comparing yourself to others. “Devote yourself to your own gifts and you’ll achieve success,” she says. “And remember that it’s going to look different from everyone else’s, because it’s supposed to.”
From the Mulholland Drive Scenic Overlook, where Acosta takes me one blistering-hot LA afternoon, we can see the entire metropolis sprawled out in front of us. She points out where she grew up, all the way on the right, the East side of the horizon. She recalls how she used to skip school and take the bus to downtown, then hike all the way up here and imagine what life would look like on the other side of the city—the life she’s living today, as if deep down, she knew what it would be like all along. “One of my girlfriends, she wanted to be an actress,” she recalls. “So she’d say things like, ‘I’m going to buy that house over there and be famous.’ But for me, any time I had to think of what my life might look like if it were something else, I would stay quiet. I didn’t have a vision of a career, per se, but I had a vision of what I wanted to see. And it was this.”
See also Doshas Decoded: Learn About Your Unique Mind & Body Type
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Rosie Acosta on Her Troubled Past and Finding Yoga
Asana and meditation teacher and popular podcast personality Rosie Acosta says yoga and a sunny outlook saved her life. Here’s how.
Here’s how our December cover model, Rosie Acosta of the Radically Loved podcast, went from troubled teen to enlightened yogapreneur.
On a sunny afternoon in the Hollywood Hills, Rosie Acosta sits on the sofa in her bright living room, knees to her chest, facing best-selling author and Ayurveda practitioner Sahara Rose Ketabi. The two women are friends, and they’ve greeted each other warmly with hugs and excited chatter. They dish for a few minutes about Acosta’s herbal tea obsession and Ketabi’s recent engagement, but the pair have come together on official business—Ketabi is making a guest appearance on Acosta’s wellness podcast, Radically Loved, to discuss her new cookbook, Eat Feel Fresh, which features modern spins on traditional Ayurvedic recipes.
Both Ayurveda enthusiasts, Acosta and Ketabi have recently returned from a six-day panchakarma, the most intense detoxification ritual in Ayurvedic medicine. The process consists of five aggressive therapies said to eliminate doshic imbalances in the body. (In Ayurveda, doshas are the three energies believed to govern physiological and mental activity.) To hear them describe it, it’s purging, pooping, and bathing in oil until you come out anew on the other side. Oh, and there’s a ton of ghee: “They put ghee in your eyes to clarify eyesight. They clean your ears with it,” Ketabi marvels. “I mean, there’s ghee in every crevice.”
Of course there’s also meditation and self-reflection and carefully prepared Ayurvedic meals of kitchari (and more ghee), and it was during a panchakarma lunch that Ketabi discovered something rather radical about Acosta: “She’s literally a psychic guru,” she tells me.
See also How to Use Ayurveda to Get Healthier Every Time You Eat
Acosta and Ketabi swear it happened like this: They were at the panchakarma retreat with two other friends. It was a virechana day—designed to clear toxins from the GI tract. They all took laxatives and were confined to their individual rooms. Around three o’clock in the afternoon, Acosta took a nap. When she woke up at 4:30, she decided to meditate “for like, two hours straight,” she says, adding that it was the longest she’s ever sat for a meditation at one time. “I started to feel this weird thing happening—like an out-of-body experience,” she says. “All of a sudden, I wanted to go visit the girls and see what they were doing.”
Without leaving her room, still deep in meditation, Acosta checked in on her friends. She saw one of them curled up on her bed, naked, and lying on her left side. Another was propped up on her stomach, journaling. Acosta didn’t see Ketabi in her room at all. Instead, she envisioned the petite brunette at the gym, running on an elliptical, talking on her cell phone in Spanish (she’s fluent) to what sounded like a wedding planner. “At the end of the conversation she goes, ‘OK. ¡Hasta luego!’ And then hangs up,” Acosta recalls.
By the time Acosta met Ketabi for lunch the next day, she’d already confirmed with the other two women that her visions of them had, in fact, been accurate. But when she started telling Ketabi what had happened, things got even weirder. Ketabi had indeed been Skyping with her wedding photographer on an elliptical the day before, ending her conversation with the Spanish farewell hasta luego. “And I remember thinking after I hung up, That so did not sound like me. Why did I say that?” Ketabi says. “I sounded like an American trying to learn Spanish.” As they hashed out the events of the day before, they discovered that Acosta’s vision had actually occurred hours before Ketabi’s conversation with her photographer took place. “It’s like she put the words in my mouth,” Ketabi concludes.
We spent a week in Los Angeles with December cover model, Rosie Acosta of the Radically Loved Podcast. Here’s how yoga helped her transform a troubled adolescence into an abundant adulthood.
From rags to richness
At 35, Acosta has come to terms with supernatural phenomena such as clairvoyance and manifesting her deepest desires—in fact, she’s built her career in the yoga space by leaning into them. She believes that practicing gratitude and intense optimism (and living a life guided by the Yoga Sutra) can lead to dramatic transformation, because she’s experienced this herself. Today Acosta lives comfortably in a two-bedroom Craftsman overlooking Laurel Canyon with her fiancé, upscale-accessories designer Torry Pendergrass; her teenage sister, who was born when she was 15; and her two dogs. Acosta admits feeling extraordinarily lucky to be making a living teaching yoga and meditation in Los Angeles. Hosting self-discovery retreats and teacher trainings, plus inspirational speaking, keeps her constantly jet-setting—and her self-help-heavy podcast, in which she’s waxed poetic on topics ranging from the importance of forgiveness to the power of intention, has recently reached 120,000 followers. But things weren’t always coming up roses for Acosta, and there was a time not too long ago when she likened yoga to a cult.
See also Rosie Acosta on How to Take Down Your Inner Critic
After a tumultuous childhood growing up in South San Gabriel in East Los Angeles, Acosta suffered from depression, anxiety, and a binge-eating disorder throughout her late teens. With two immigrant parents (her mother from Spain and her father from Mexico) trying to make ends meet amid gang violence and the racist drug war that defined Los Angeles in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Acosta learned early on that there was a price to pay for being Latin American in her part of the world. “There was never any, ‘Oh, you have to grow up and go to school and have aspirations to be successful,” she recalls. “No. It was, ‘Your job is to stay alive.’”
Often referred to as the decade of death, 1988–1998 in Los Angeles County was marked by record homicide rates and violence. Gangs terrorized the neighborhoods surrounding Acosta’s home, where she lived with her parents, her older sister, and a revolving cast of extended relatives. One evening in March of ’88, Acosta’s 16-year-old uncle, charged with babysitting her and her cousin for the night, promised to take the pair of five-year-old girls to the arcade. Instead, he parked his black Camaro outside of Skateland U.S.A., a roller rink by day, music venue by night, that’s notable for launching hip-hop supergroup N.W.A. The concrete depot on Central Avenue in Compton was situated deep in Bloods territory, and although a sign reading NO CAPS — NO COLORS adorned the entry door, the crowd was frequently a stormy sea of red. Peering out from the back seat of the Camaro, Acosta could see a gaggle of high schoolers and gangbangers drinking and shouting in the noisy lot. “Wait in the car,” her uncle told her. “I’m just gonna go watch this show, and then I’ll be right back.” An early N.W.A. fan, her uncle had brought her to the controversial rap group’s now-legendary first performance, immortalized in the 2015 biopic Straight Outta Compton.
“He left, and we just looked at each other, so freaked out,” Acosta recalls. The girls hid under a Saltillo blanket as violence erupted outside—until their uncle emerged, hours later, with a bloody face and a busted left eye. “I still have no idea how that happened, but then nobody asked him,” Acosta recalls. “He was like, ‘We were at the arcade,’ and my parents were like, ‘OK.’ It was literally like Lord of the Flies, you know?”
Exactly 10 years later, in the spring of 1998, Acosta sat in the driver’s seat of a running cop car, surrounded by six or seven officers with their guns drawn, all screaming for her to get out of the car. She was a sophomore at Mark Keppel High School, and she and some friends had decided to ditch sixth period to hang out at Sierra Vista Park in northeast LA. The small grassy park is home to a basketball court and a primary-colored playground, and while the teens were en route, a car chase was going down nearby. A police car had been in pursuit of a red Honda Prelude when both cars screeched to a halt at the edge of the park. The chase continued on foot—the abandoned vehicles left running on the pavement. “I was like Dora the Explorer, looking in both cars, trying to be a badass because all these people were watching,” says Acosta. “And someone was like, ‘Oh, you should get into the cop car.’” Clad in fingerless panda-print gloves and a chunky black sweater, Acosta hopped into the front seat, unaware that the place was crawling with undercover cops. The incident resulted in her arrest for attempted grand theft auto.
After several traumatic events growing up, Rosie realized she needed to change the direction her life was headed.
Rosie from the block
Ventura Boulevard is humming with hipsters as Acosta and I sit beneath a bright-blue umbrella, amid teal bistro tables, outside Australian-inspired coffee shop Bluestone Lane. The chain is new to LA, and Acosta is hoping this outpost will be as good as the one she frequents in New York City. We both order avocado toast, and over coffee and matcha discuss her forthcoming memoir and how she came to find yoga. She’s animated and easy to talk to, with an attitude and mannerisms that are a little bit JLo. (Case in point, as Ketabi walked out the door at the end of her podcast recording session with Acosta, she turned to me and said, “The way I’m envisioning the [YJ] cover is, she’s wearing little pigtails on her head, like buns. And she’s doing a handstand on one hand. And wearing those pants that have the straps, but instead of ‘Calvin Klein’ it says, ‘Rosie from the Block’”—a direct reference to the 2002 Jennifer Lopez chart topper “Jenny from the Block.”) In short, Acosta is the real deal, and she practices what she preaches because she believes it saved her life.
Acosta tells me that if she hadn’t been booked that day in 1998, things may not have turned around quite like they have. Traumatic episodes such as the one that unfolded at the N.W.A. concert colored her childhood, and it was only after her arrest that she was truly able to reflect on how her upbringing was wreaking havoc on her adolescence. Living through a never-ending reel of teen deaths, hold-ups at grocery stores, and other violent scenarios eventually led to debilitating panic attacks, depression, and other symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. And after her arrest, court-ordered probation meant she could no longer cut school to blow off steam with her friends, most of whom were on a similar path of self-destruction. Discovering meditation and self-inquiry, plus a dramatic shift in attitude, is what revealed to her that she didn’t have to buy into what other people expected of her, which by her account, wasn’t much. “Nobody around us was trying to cultivate growth of any kind,” she says. “For me, the unpopular decision was to succeed. It’s fucked up, but the unpopular vote was to move out of my environment and become something else.”
During her senior year of high school, her mom, who supervised the cleaning staff at a local hospital, returned one night from work with some literature for the Self-Realization Fellowship temple in Hollywood—a white-stucco sanctuary with gold architectural embellishments and arched stained-glass windows—founded by Paramahansa Yogananda, an Indian yogi often credited with helping bring meditation and Kriya Yoga to the West.
“My mom said, ‘Hey, one of the ladies at work says she was stressed out and meditation worked for her—you should try it,’” recalls Acosta. “I took the little pamphlets, and I started to read about affirmations, and meditation, and manifestation, and the Law of Attraction, and all these things, and I really liked it. I was like, Oh, it’s like magic.”
But when she showed up at the temple a few weeks later, it wasn’t exactly love at first sight: “I was like, ‘This is a fucking cult. Get me out of here,’” she says. Even so, something about the lecture she heard that day resonated with her deep down, and she decided to stick with it. “The sermon was about how we were responsible for our own happiness,” Acosta says. “That really caught my attention, because I was like, Whoa, whoa, what does that mean? I was having this spiritual awakening of sorts, and it really spoke to me—this idea that I needed to be responsible for creating the life I wanted. I needed to be the person who rectified my bad behavior,” she says. “Somebody else couldn’t do that for me.”
Gradually, the path toward yoga revealed itself. When Acosta was 22, she grew interested in the physical aspects of the yogic lifestyle she was beginning to adopt, and she decided to attend a teacher training that, she would later come to realize, was unconventional, to say the least. “I found this little Kundalini Yoga studio in Pasadena that offered a weekend-long immersive training led by this sweet couple,” she says. As it turned out, they were followers of Osho, the controversial leader of the Rajneesh movement, recently popularized by the Netflix documentary series Wild Wild Country. “They had Osho posters everywhere,” Acosta recalls. “I took away a ton of information, but I remember thinking, There’s no way I can teach yoga. But after that, yoga started becoming more of a daily practice.”
She began regularly frequenting the Center for Yoga (now YogaWorks) and attending workshops and 200-hour teacher trainings with the intention of both deepening her practice and eventually becoming a yoga teacher. Yoga was where everything made sense, she says.
Rod Stryker, the founder of ParaYoga who became Acosta’s teacher in 2011, was surprised to learn of the adversity Acosta overcame to become the warm and wise yogi she is today. He says of their early days together: “I didn’t hear anything about hardship. I experienced this amazingly present, vibrant, mature, full soul.” But Acosta says that when she started studying with Stryker (her favorite teacher was a student of his, and encouraged Acosta to try his class), she had really only just begun her journey into yoga. “Things were resonating, but I couldn’t put the pieces together. It was like having a compass, and seeing signs—just trying to figure out how to bring all the clues together,” she says.
Rosie encourages students to commit to their own ability and potential while not comparing themselves to others.
Reflections from the other side
Today, after seven years of Stryker’s tutelage, Acosta certainly appears to have found her way. She teaches her own students at Wanderlust Hollywood and the newly opened Den Meditation studio, and recently, she and Pendergrass have been talking about starting a family of their own. The lessons she imparts on her students she’s learned from Stryker and from her own transformation. First and foremost, “practice for a long period of time without interruption and with an attitude of service”—wisdom from Patanjali (author of the Yoga Sutra) that’s so important today, she says, when most of us can’t even read an email on the computer without reaching for our phone. “I always say, this is a marathon, not a sprint. There are no freeways to enlightenment,” she says. The other mainstay of her teaching is something she’s gleaned from her own life: Commit to your own ability and your own potential, and quit comparing yourself to others. “Devote yourself to your own gifts and you’ll achieve success,” she says. “And remember that it’s going to look different from everyone else’s, because it’s supposed to.”
From the Mulholland Drive Scenic Overlook, where Acosta takes me one blistering-hot LA afternoon, we can see the entire metropolis sprawled out in front of us. She points out where she grew up, all the way on the right, the East side of the horizon. She recalls how she used to skip school and take the bus to downtown, then hike all the way up here and imagine what life would look like on the other side of the city—the life she’s living today, as if deep down, she knew what it would be like all along. “One of my girlfriends, she wanted to be an actress,” she recalls. “So she’d say things like, ‘I’m going to buy that house over there and be famous.’ But for me, any time I had to think of what my life might look like if it were something else, I would stay quiet. I didn’t have a vision of a career, per se, but I had a vision of what I wanted to see. And it was this.”
See also Doshas Decoded: Learn About Your Unique Mind & Body Type
0 notes
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