Vision and Muscle

What a long, strange trip it’s been.

After Kristin Olson ’73 graduated from Colorado College in 1973, she taught elementary school and lived in a cabin in Black Forest, Colo., raising eyebrows with her homemade tofu, black tights, and bright gypsy skirts.

Thirty years later, she’s the vision and the muscle behind the Urban Yoga Center, the studio she founded in Palm Springs, Calif., in 2001.

In between, there were stints in Mexico and Memphis, even a period as a modern dancer in San Francisco in the mid-’70s followed by nearly 20 years “kicking ass, basically” as physical director of the Ashram spa in California.

Olson’s the same — free-spirited, open-hearted, adventurous, attracted to both the athletic and the divine — but perhaps the world has moved closer to her once-radical concept that there is more to life than the rat race. Tofu’s available at chain grocery stores; meditation is mainstream.

“There is an awareness that we need to take care of our physical, spiritual, and mental selves. Everyone is looking for something more,” Olson says. “Yoga is a household word now. The benefits are widely known and borne out by science.”

But Olson’s Urban Yoga Center provides more than access to a clinically proven physical therapy; it is a community where many people —teenagers, the elderly, gay, straight, male, female — come together in a place that offers peace, serenity, and unity. At her “healing arts center,” where classes on ashtanga and hatha yoga coexist with workshops on transformational breath, ayurveda, and women’s self-defense, Olson is proud and passionate about her work and the life she’s created in this high desert valley. Find more information at www.urbanyoga.org.