Before moving to Port Townsend and starting his Mystic Monkey Yoga studio, Jason Calsyn was in San Fransisco, sitting at a desk, staring at a computer. 

“I would just sit at a desk in front of the computer in my bedroom for hours and hours every day and I wasn’t really interacting with people. I wasn’t moving around a lot,” said Calsyn, who worked for a tech company from his home in San Francisco before he began his yoga practice. “One of the things that I was discovering was that it was really unhealthy for me. When I started teaching yoga it was night and day from that.”

Calsyn noticed a monumental change when he began practicing yoga 15 years ago, while he was still living in California, and decided to pursue his practice even further by first becoming a teacher and then starting his own studio. 

After he received his registered yoga teacher 200-hour certificate at Maui Hot Yoga in 2012 and his 500-hour certificate at Sampoorna Yoga in Goa, India, in 2016, Calsyn made his way to Port Townsend, where he opened up Mystic Monkey Yoga, on East Sims Way, in 2017.

Now, Mystic Monkey Yoga is celebrating its one-year anniversary on Oct. 27, and Calsyn could not be happier with the choice he made to abandon the desk job and become a full-time yoga instructor and business owner.

“I want to live my life on my own terms,” Calsyn said. “It’s been really enriching for my life to do this in a way that I would never feel if I were still sitting in front of a computer all day.”

At Mystic Monkey Yoga, Calsyn and his team of certified yoga instructors offer a full seven-day schedule of hot yoga classes for all yoga practitioners, new or old, experienced or first-timers. The classes come in a range of varieties, from a Hatha yoga class which takes place at a cool 100 degrees, to a 95-degree Vinyasa class, and more room temperature Yin class. 

Hot yoga, particularly Bikram yoga, has been known to be controversial, with the high temperatures sometimes causing health concerns, but for Calsyn, it’s all about finding the right balance and the right temperature for your body.

“When hot yoga first came along, it was pretty extreme and I would say excessive in some places, the way it was taught,” Calsyn said. “I want to offer an environment that is supportive instead of making you miserable. … The heat helps people’s muscles to warm up, it helps to stretch in a safer way, it helps open up blood vessels so you get better circulation.”

Leah Layman is one of the yoga instructors at Mystic Monkey who moved to Port Townsend around the same time Calsyn did and has been with the studio since it started. Layman said hot yoga was something relatively new to Port Townsend when Mystic Monkey opened.

“It’s sort of a breath of fresh air for the town,” Layman said. “It’s all hot yoga, and I don’t think Port Townsend had that before.”

Part of the reason Calsyn wanted to have such a full schedule of yoga classes – classes take place in the morning and evening each day of the week – was so that his customers would be able to find a class that was perfect for them and a teacher that they liked.

“I wanted to cultivate a community of people who come to classes on a regular basis regardless of where they’re at with their practice,” Calsyn said. “As time has gone on, more and more people have been coming in and there’s more of a core group of regulars who are here, which feels really nice.”

Yoga, according to Calsyn, is a good community practice. Most recently, he has started a new “acroyoga” class, in which yoga poses are performed in pairs, with one person balancing on another. It allows people in class to get to know one another while deepening their yoga skills.

“I’ve really liked the connections I’ve made,” Layman said. “It’s bringing yoga to people who have never done it before and showing how it can help your life.”

According to Layman, Calsyn has given the yoga instructors at Mystic Monkey “the space to experiment” with different types of yoga classes, such as hip-hop yoga.

Calsyn is also in the planning stages of a winter yoga retreat in Guatemala in February, which he hopes will offer people a “way to step outside of their daily lives and to tune into themselves” in the middle of the dark and cold Pacific Northwest winter.

For the studio’s anniversary, Calsyn is also planning a weekend of free classes, discounts on retail items, raffle prizes, and a few other surprises to celebrate the achievement. 

“Seeing this place grow and seeing the community develop, people being excited to come in and telling me about the benefits that it’s giving them, that feels very rewarding and gratifying,” Calsyn said. “Yoga is an opportunity to be of service to others and to help people be healthy and help people be mindful, so I feel really happy about being able to do that.”