Yoga Soup for Teenagers

March 2026

Dear Friends and Family of the Soup,

Yoga Soup is an impossible place. Because every time I walk in the front door, the space feels like it was built just for me. Whether I’ve had the worst day of my life or the best, show up crying or laughing, loose shoulders or a coiled jaw, the feeling is the same. It shouldn’t exist, a place with the capacity to meet and celebrate the infinite multitudes of a single person, let alone the countless people who come to Yoga Soup every day.

But it does. And it has for 20 years. It’s a resting place for weary travellers on the path of this incredible and overwhelming life. It’s a living room where friends and family and strangers gather over good food and curl up with revolutionary books. It’s a concert venue. A ceremonial container. A dance floor. A haven. And yes, a yoga studio too. It’s become my clubhouse over the past 3 years or so- I’m here taking classes, cleaning, doing homework, eating dinner, investigating books, chatting with friends new and old, napping, and dancing around this place as often as I can. 

So what? What’s the big deal about one little building with steaming soup and a big orange sign that tells you to breathe? The deal is, I’m seventeen, about to graduate high school, and planning to move away from Santa Barbara for the first time in my life. For a number of reasons, I’m terrified, but mostly because I have to walk away from this place and all of the people who make it feel like home. 

3 years ago, Eddie handed me a copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and called it “required reading” for my education. Since then, this community has taught me more than any other classroom on earth. Yoga Soup told me at 15 years old, contrary to the rest of the world, that I could breathe. During a time and place in life when every influence told me to keep it together, Yoga Soup invited me to fall apart, and its arms were open to catch all the pieces.

Over my time at Yoga Soup, I’ve learned that I deserve this, a place to call my own, a place to go when my grandfather died, when I wanted a hug, when I got into college, when I made something I was proud of, when I wanted to make someone else smile. But it’s not just me, you deserve it too, we all do. Because you can’t be a person if you can’t breathe. You can’t be a daughter or a teacher or a father or a plumber or a friend or a student or a lover if you can’t breathe. And the miraculous thing about Yoga Soup is that my breathing doesn’t take away from your breathing. There is no crowding out, because there is no limit. The hands, minds, and hearts of this place can hold us all. It shouldn’t exist. It does.

Whether it’s here at 28 Parker Way, in the space between books on a well-oiled table, in the wafting smell of fresh bread, within the four corners of a rubber mat, or anywhere else in the world, Please Breathe. Find a place that feels like safety, that feels like home, where people smile at you and don’t need you to always smile back, where each message on the wall is written for you, where each teacher speaks the same message of love in an infinite variety of languages.

As I take steps away from the only corner of the world I’ve ever known, I am overflowing with gratitude. Thank you, all of you, whether I’ve talked to you once or a hundred times or not at all, for holding me in these past years of rapid transition and growth. You have taught me to step into a radical love for this life that is tragically rare in teenagers (and everyone else) these days. Cultivated here is a sense of safety, care, and the most respectful kind of love- the kind that sees to the very base of my soul. 

I’ll be back, and so excited to see how this community grows in the time that I’m gone. I’m going to miss you all so much. 

           Wow. Thank you. I love you.

                      Let go of your face.

                                  It’s a work of art.

With Gratitude,

Ruby Bargiel