In the outskirts of Hollywood’s lavish terrazzo-paved sidewalks and noisy insomniac street life, lies a small cottage with its own parking. This meager structure— known as the Women’s Club of Hollywood— once served as a safe haven for women in the early 1900s. It now serves a similar purpose in the lives of beleaguered Angelenos every Monday and Wednesday evening. On those nights, you’ll find a man who used to go by the name “Stress” teaching people how to leave behind the body stimulating flood of hormones from which he derived his moniker. Today, he simply goes by the name of Dan Overberger.
“The word is ‘experience.’ I don’t teach yoga anymore. I’m trying to create a yoga experience,” Overberger said. People come away from Dan’s practice not only with his words and ideas, but his essence. With other yoga practices, you leave tired and physically satisfied, but not with an experience. Each person is a force travelling through time and space that ever so often collides with another force that, as is the case with his classes, are so strong that they leave a lasting impression years after the collision occurred.
Overberger is the living-breathing embodiment of Hollywood culture, like the gurus of old in a modern day landscape. He is of average height, slender yet muscular, moves with grace and purpose, is soft spoken, but what he says has a gravitas that is heavy and profound. Dan tries to be unfiltered and not think too much about the meaning behind what he says. He likens this approach to the process of writing a song: “When you hear the melody, the words seem to manifest themselves.
“The way I understand it and the way you understand it can mean two totally different things,” Overberger added. His good nature is present in everything he produces—his website, writing and music—including in email exchange. Many people say that intention and tone are lost or hard to read in written words, but Dan’s rings true. He writes with wit and simplicity. He writes the way he speaks. There’s a “blue-collar-do-it-yourself-punk-rock” element to his classes, and the people that have a similar background to his get more out of them.
On your way to the Women’s Club, you come across the Will & Ariel Durant public library—on the corner of La Brea and Sunset—which acts as a shelter for the homeless during the day. The smell of old books and old sweaty men fills the rows of stacks near the young adult section. Their presence serves as a sort of cautionary tale.
“50,000 people are on the street in a town where some guy gets $3 million to be a character on a movie that was a comic book. You know?” Overberger said. “That’s a weird disparity. It’s just weird.” He himself was temporarily homeless, but never “skid row” homeless, living out of his car. However, even in that squalid condition, he felt compelled to help people in this situation once he got out of it. Since then, he has worked with the Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition and raised money for them through yoga benefit events.
From Sunset to Hollywood via La Brea Avenue, you hike past bright neon signs for fast food, strip clubs and cheap motels. Sunset—with its rich history of sex, drugs and rock and roll—and Hollywood—with one of opulence and decadence—serve as a Sodom and Gomorra where the scent of the now legal marijuana lingers in the air. In the balmy breezeless night, middle school girls in checkered uniform skirts were out with their mothers selling chocolate, while men in mangy wigs were out with their pimps selling their bodies: treats made available for a variety of palates.
One of the things that Dan discovered from his time as a homeless man was that the Los Angeles community is not one that really helps people at a certain point. “America is not a place where we pull each other up,” he noted. “It’s a place where we climb on top of each other.”
It made him take business more seriously. Even though it’s hard for Dan to see yoga as his “job,” he loves doing it. He sees that it revolves around people and helping them get to where they need to go.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with me, but through me, as whoever I am, is how I facilitate it,” Overberger said. He believes that if people relate to him it’s because they’re on a similar path or have a similar background. In America, yoga has been co-opted by several institutions such as the gym and the new age community in forms of physical fitness and self-help. “Yoga is yoga. It’s its own thing,” he added.
Initially, Dan wanted to teach at a specific yoga studio, the place where he used to study and had a couple of revelatory and awakening moments. For a while, he was obsessed with wanting to teach there. It became his goal, but it never happened. Unlike other yoga studios that might intentionally or unintentionally impose barriers on people, Dan’s approach is based on removing these barriers; which may present themselves sometimes as fluff or intimidating.
“A lot of people want to be the teacher because they think that it’s a forum to voice, to be heard, and tell their story,” Dan said. “The only reason I tell my story is so that others can tell theirs. There always has to be something for someone else or else it’s just masturbation.”
These barriers may also be economical— some yoga studios around LA only take in students willing to pay costly monthly subscriptions—or educational where the jargon that accompanies the practice revolves on understanding a list of Sanskrit words.
Overberger has no real interest in opening his own yoga studio in a physical- mortgage- paying- subscription-incurring space and prefers the flexibility and practicality of his Black Market Yoga, hosted out of the Women’s Club. “I’m an extremely practical person, on some level,” he said. When he thinks about running a storefront yoga studio, he has visions of himself being up all night going through numbers and trying to figure stuff out, like calling people and finding out why one of his teachers can’t come to work tomorrow. “That’s not my life. It might as well be a 7-Eleven,” he added.
On the corner of Hollywood and La Brea—the major intersection nearest to the Women’s Club—there is a mega church that has a “come-as-you-are” approach and welcomes the eccentric and diverse people of Hollywood to its stadium seating and rock concert atmosphere worship services. As this establishment struggles with the various vices enticing the lost flock of Hollywood, two buildings over, Dan struggles to bring the subconscious mind into the fold of the self. Of the various layers that comprise the human body, Dan finds that the subconscious mind is the most difficult to bring into alignment. He believes that it affects us in ways we are not aware of; whether we’re dealing with a physical, emotional, or spiritual ailment. Even if we don’t know the source of the ailment, we have to know what to look for. “It’s like telling someone who hasn’t had sex what it’s like to have sex,” Overberger said.
When you arrive at the Women’s Club, the small cottage double doors welcomes you into a banquet hall with a stage at the far end and windows lining the southernmost wall. Some of his students begin to stretch their bodies and focus their minds. Dan hopes that through yoga and meditation, we can find the crazy and the defects within ourselves.
“Humans see everyone as crazy but us,” Dan said about giving advice to students. Initially, Dan found the role of mentor difficult to cope with. It wasn’t until he realized that he was allowed to say Hey man, I don’t know that he felt like he didn’t have to know the answers to every question.
“Sometimes people don’t want to hear the answer to their question,” he added. “Sometimes people want a human interaction with someone.”
Dan believes that as a student, you always develop a feeling for the teacher because they are guiding you to a certain space. You think that the teacher understands that space or that they know where they are taking you, “but we all go to a different space,” he said. It took Dan a long time to figure out that there were limitations to that. Sometimes it’s difficult for a teacher to know where the student is coming from exactly. “It’s dangerous because it would be like dropping a bomb on their lives and they may not see it even after you’ve pointed it out to them,” he added. “They may see it and feel embarrassed.” He finds that this realization often creates a ridge between the student and the teacher.
A student came up to Dan and reminded him of the times when he used to go to people’s houses and play records. “I feel like I’m going to your house to listen to a record,” the student said. The Club is a haven, as warm and as welcoming as a home. Dan was welcoming his students home. “I love this album. It’s going to be great,” the student added referring to Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon,” a record Dan often plays when there’s a full moon. That night, a waning gibbous lit the sky.
In the darkness, red, green and blue lights pierced through it adding to the soothing ambience of the room. As in the album’s cover art, we had traversed the prism of the monotony of everyday life into the chromaticism of yoga. The smell of incense and the sound of chatter filled the dark room, as if on the shadowed portion of the moon.
Dan begins his classes with some light banter and levity; his comic timing is impeccable. His slight, wiry figure and lithe light-haired silhouette began a really long one-hour dance; with occasional stillness and movement. Even though he was exerting a high amount of energy, his body language always remained calm. Dan asked for stillness. He instructed his attentive students to breathe as he cued the music. Dan spends a combination of time on and off the stage. Making his way through a sea of people as if walking through a living sculpture garden, he adjusts students’ bodies. Dan’s soft voice and sweet drawl provides a soothing yet authoritative guide to do things with your body you don’t normally do in everyday life. You hear a hocket of puffs of air across the room as students exhale. Amidst the darkness—of the sky, the room and the side of the moon draped in it—these people find the light within Dan, within themselves.
Dan famously ends his practice with a short meditation and the phrase, You’re living your dream… don’t miss it. He himself was living his dream of being a rock guitarist named Stress touring across Europe with his Death Rock band—a combination of gothic and punk rock music. However, that dream felt labored, like slowly chipping away at a wall with a pickaxe. On the other hand, yoga has felt like a series of open doors that Dan simply keeps walking through.
Dan’s practice is ethereal and lives in his students’ minds and hearts. They love him and would follow him to any space, not limiting themselves to the Women’s Club or Runyon Canyon, where he teaches during the day. His students feel that Dan gets them.
The Daniel Overberger Experience takes students through difficult yoga poses that may seem undesirable at first, but through perseverance allow you to explore where the undesirability is rooted. Dan believes that exploring these undesirable fields allows you to face other “real world” fears like moving or facing your landlord or boss. “If you can go beyond the fear, the mind opens up. But initially, the fear closes the mind down,” Dan said. “Everything’s got to be in balance. Unless you’re in balance, then it’s sometimes good to go to the extremes and be in the moment.”
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Jose Oseguera is an LA-based writer of poetry, short fiction and literary nonfiction. Having grown up in a primarily immigrant, urban environment, Jose has always been interested in the people and places around him, and the stories that each of these has to share. His writing has been featured in The Esthetic Apostle, McNeese Review, and The Main Street Rag. His work has also been nominated for the “Best of the Net” award (2018 and 2019) and the “Pushcart Prize.” He is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection “The Milk of Your Blood.” www.joseoseguera.com
