It’s the miracles she sees on a daily basis with her students and the peace the practice has brought her that have kept Leslie Collins in the business of yoga through the pandemic, fire and personal turmoil.
“When I feel anxiety building, when I’m worried about past, yoga helps me get back into my body and the present moment and all is well in my world,” said Collins, owner of Oroville Yoga Center. “But it’s the miracles I see every day with my students that brings it, this work, home to me.
“When people who have been in pain on daily basis get a glimpse of not being in pain and what the quality of their life could be, that’s when I know God is telling me this is what I was born into the world to do.”
A first-generation Mexican-American and Los Angeles native, Collins gave up her quinceañera — a traditional Mexican celebration of a girl’s 15th birthday and rite of passage from childhood to adulthood — in lieu of acting lessons. By the time she was 18, she was persuing acting “full force.”
“I was a working actor for four years,” Collins said. “Nothing I’d be known for. I was just a fly on the wall, so you wouldn’t recognize me, but I was working and I met a lot of rad people.”
Collins was also a regular at the gym, working to keep her body fit — so when a yogi and friend suggested she do yoga, she responded, “Oh yoga would be too easy for me.”
“She gave me a loving smile and just said, ‘OK,’” recalled Collins. “A year and a half later, I was in the studio, and bless her heart for being so kind to me when I’d been insulting by saying it was too easy. Yoga is one of the most difficult things anybody can do on the planet.”
That was in 2008, the same year Collins moved to Northern California, where she continued taking yoga classes at a gym where she was working in Paradise. Soon she was teaching classes at the gym and filling in for teachers at yoga studios in Chico, then began teaching at Oroville Sports Club and Exhale Yoga & Pilates Studio.
“I wasn’t sure I had any business teaching, but I knew how much yoga helped me and I wanted to share what was helpful to me with others,” she said. “It just started snowballing from there.”
By 2011, Collis had earned a Ph.D. in metaphysical sciences from the University of Metaphysical Sciences in Arcata, where she studied a variety of subjects including world religions, anger management, shadow work and yoga among other subjects.
After receiving her degree and becoming a register yoga teacher, Collins opened her first studio, Paradise Holistic Center. She closed that studio a year later when she became pregnant with her first son, Preston. In 2013, she opened her first Oroville studio, Fierce Grace Yoga. When she became pregnant with her second son, Zama, she closed that studio.
“Every time I had a baby, I took time off work to raise him,” Collins said. “In 2017, I opened Oroville Yoga Studio downtown in the space where Exhale Yoga used to be. It had good energy from being a studio before. I’ve been open ever since because I’m not having more kids.”
Growth
Since she launched Oroville Yoga Studio, Collins has weathered a divorce, the loss of her Berry Creek home in the 2020 Bear Fire (also known as the North Complex Fire) and the COVID pandemic.
Through it all she said her daily yoga practice kept her centered and sane. And, with the advent of the new year Collins is taking her business to the next level and moving to a new location where she and her three other teachers — Rob Cossetta; Alan Riley, a chiropractor; and Michelle Paloma — will have plenty of space to teach various classes including myofascial release, aerial yoga and belly dancing.
“Our current studio has less than 500 square feet of practice space. The new studio has 1,400 square feet,” said Collins. “It’s an amazing studio where more people will be more comfortable.”
Oroville Yoga will open in its new location at 1372 Myers Street by mid-January.
Though yoga can be challenging, Collins has created a studio where “literally anybody with any body can come and do yoga. I have students who are as young as 14 and as old as 84. It’s a neutral, non-judgmental place where anybody can come and practice.”
The studio offers beginner classes like yoga 101; aerial yoga, which combines traditional yoga poses with suspended silks or hammocks that provide support to allow for deeper stretching and more challenging poses; and restore and release yoga, a gentle, slow-paced yoga class that focuses on relaxation and stress reduction.
The most popular class, however, is myofascial release yoga.
Myofascial release yoga is a type of yoga that uses props like foam rollers, blocks and balls to relieve tension in the body’s connective tissue, which helps improve mobility, increase blood flow and reduce chronic pain, said Collins. In these classes, the studio owner uses her therapeutic yoga training to take the foundation yoga poses and “infuses them with mobility and strength training and myofascial release.”
“I’m trained to work in conjunction with doctors,” said Collins. “If people bring in X-rays or X-ray reports or MRIs, the more helpful I can be. The more I know the better, the more helpful I can be. But is they haven’t seen a doctor, I will use my expertise to do my very best to see what I can do to help them.
“The one thing I can say with certainty, though, is if you get yourself in the door, your life will definitely improve.”
‘Not just yoga’
There are only positive customer comments on the studio’s website and Yelp attesting to the benefits people have experienced practicing yoga at the studio. Reviews include such testimonies as: “Best yoga classes I’ve ever attended. I am so glad to have found the Oroville Yoga Center;” “It’s not just Yoga, we learn HOW the body moves and avoid injuries as a result;” and, “I took pain pills every night to go to sleep for ten years for my debilitating back pain. After two months at Oroville Yoga Center, I was no longer taking pain pills.”
Mandy Wentz, who has been practicing yoga with Collins steadily for two years said, “I love it. The injury prevention is next level. I can’t believe how much my strength had improved. The meditation and relation techniques I’ve learned help me immensely in my everyday life.”
The cost for classes and membership packages at Oroville Yoga Studio is comparable to other local studios, though slightly less expensive than those offered in Chico. Individual monthly memberships are $85. Couples’ memberships are $110. To drop in for a class, the cost is $18 and the monthly cost for a two-class-a-week membership, the studio’s most popular offering, is $55. Collins also offers a two weeks for $22 unlimited membership for new student so “people can check out all the classes and see what works for their body and schedule.”
“Yoga is about fine tuning your temple so that you can be useful for something greater than you, so that you can make a difference in this world,” said Collins. “It’s a simple concept but it works for me and I’ve seen it work for others. When I move, I feel better and the better I feel the more I’m able go out into the world and do better. It’s a simple concept but it’s really powerful.”
More information about classes, schedules, private sessions and pricing may be found at orovilleyogacenter.com.
Reach Kyra Gottesman at kgottesman@chicoer.com
