Alyssa Klazek, who goes by her stage name Alyssa Jean, is quite a busy individual.
The young single mom of two girls, Charlie and Juniper, is a yoga instructor and a singer/songwriter.
“I had Charlie when I was really young and I was dealing with anxiety from having had her and also she was, from now what I know, a bit of a colicky baby,” said Klazek.
That anxiety led her to to her training, as the tried to find something to help her nerves.
Mediation, she said, was what and still is what helps her with that, which then led to yoga.
Originally from Calgary, Klazek moved to the Island only three years ago.
When she first moved to Victoria, she went to a park and met a mother who was with her child. The mother mentioned there was a mom and toddler yoga class that she couldn’t get anyone to take on and asked Klazek if she would be interested, to which she agreed.
She now teaches at Mothering Touch Yoga in Victoria, where she runs a mom and toddler yoga, class and others for moms and babies, prenatal yoga, and now she has her doula training on the go.
Klazek also began teaching yoga at McTavish Academy of Arts, including classes in Hatha Flow, prenatal and mom and baby yoga. She said she loves seeing the creation of the relationship between parent and child as they move along from prenatal yoga to mom and baby and then mom and toddler classes.
“That’s what I love the most is that they create a community among themselves in prenatal yoga and also with me so that I can not only be caring for them, but also their little ones as everything progresses along,” she said.
Klazek is also a singer/songwriter and often blends her yoga into that.
“Singing definitely came first. All the things that I do, the doula work, the yoga work, music, it’s all a part of the same thing, which is coming from a place of working with energy, releasing, all that kind of stuff. It feels very much the same,” she said.
Klazek was born into a family of musicians. Her parents were in a band when they were young and her sisters play guitar, sing and write songs.
“I was just following suit. If everybody was doctors, that’s what I would have become. Thankfully everybody was musicians.”
Klazek’s done various musical events and made an album when she was just 14 called And so it Begins. She was also on Canadian Idol as a teenager, making it to the top 18.
She later attended music college in Nelson, B.C. and went on tour with a woman called Miss Quincy.
She was also in a band with her ex-partner, along with a corporate cover band called the Dino Martinis, where she learned the music of Abba and Lady Gaga.
“That was my pop star days. I was a pop star for a little while,” she said with a smile.
She’s always been a busker, however, which is her main source of income and has been since she was 15.
Coming to McTavish, she gets to combine her music with yoga, allowing for both her passions to take place in one area.
Her latest album, set to come out this summer it titled Tint, an album about her life currently.
“Words that I’m really focussing on lately (are) truth. If we’re not being truthful to ourselves and the world what’s the point?”
A lot of the album, she said, is about self-empowerment and the idea of Tint, is that she felt someone else’s tint in her sunglasses.
“On the cover it’s a pair of sunglasses and the background is one colour and then the sunglasses have a different colour,” she said, adding that it’s this idea that everything looks like a different tint now, and it’s her tint versus something that wasn’t hers previously.
Klazek said it’s about living in your truth, your tint and figuring out what that is — which is also a part of yoga concepts of who you are and why you are here.
“Once you find that, you live within your truth, you live within your tint … everything flows your way.”
For more information or to sign up for yoga classes visit mctavishacademy.ca or call 778-351-0088.
