Joanna

Hi, I’m Joanna from Sebastopol California USA; I live with my husband Jesse, my spirited teenager, Marcus. We care for a variety of animals that came with or got adopted into our home.

The tea business that we tended and grew for many years became a casualty over COVID. In a blink of an eye, we closed all our restaurants and laid off our employees. It may seem like a heartbreaking experience, which it was, but at the same time, it also felt like a much-needed exhale. And that exhalation gave us a moment to appreciate and remember the essence of why we started this business in the first place – it is to give people a moment in time to pause and be present in the beauty of sipping a cup of tea. It seemed that the lock-down and the COVID brought back this simple, effortless, and yogic-like way of being. COVID has allowed us to step back and realize the amount of strain we endured while running a business with many moving targets. In the early parts of the lock-down, I remember feeling ungrounded and agitated by the people around me. Relief came when Acharya delivered a video message about the pandemic and our yogic duty during these times. This message and the subsequent Bhagavad Gita talks brought me to a faithful surrender and permission to discover an engaged stillness again. Over the year of the pandemic, we have temporarily moved the business online. I stepped away from my responsibilities at work to explore possibilities internally as well as externally. The amount of time I spent driving in cars has been an enormous drain on my system. Without all this extraneous duty, I have found the fun in just goofing around with my son, and boy, we get goofy. Marcus has taken up D.J.ing, and though it is not at all my kind of music, I enjoy seeing his spirit and playfulness – something we did not have much time for when we are always in transit from one place to the other.