Kefi Yoga
Yoga Studio
The Greek word kefi has no perfect English translation. It gestures toward
joy, passion, the ineffable pleasure of being fully alive — what Angeliki
Papadakis describes as “an overpowering emotion you have when you completely let go in the moment, release inhibitions, and allow yourself to joyfully feel the life pulsing through your body and soul.” It is also, not
coincidentally, exactly what people describe when they walk into her studio
on Crenshaw Boulevard in Torrance.
That studio exists because of a pandemic, a Greek family, and, somewhat less directly, a Torrance parks worker who just needed to stretch.
When COVID shuttered the corporate yoga studios in the South Bay, Papadakis — Angel to her students — took her practice outside. It started in her mother’s backyard, with her brother Petros — former USC tailback, team captain, and now Fox Sports college football analyst — who needed somewhere to channel his energy with the season on hold and young children underfoot. Then her mother wanted a class. Then cousins started showing up. Then her father started cooking shrimp pasta for everyone, and it turned, as she puts it, into a Greek festival every day.
Meanwhile, something else was happening across the South Bay. Yoga teachers who had been laid off by the corporate studios were quietly keeping the flame alive — slipping out to cliffsides in Palos Verdes, parks in Torrance, any flat outdoor surface that would hold a mat. They weren’t advertising. They were just practicing, and teaching anyone who showed up. “Instructors need to teach and students need their practice,” Papadakis said, “especially during times of uncertainty.” Word passed between them in the way of people who share a devotion: I heard you’re still doing yoga. Oh — I heard you are, too.
Eventually the scattered circles converged at Hickory Park in Torrance,
setting up mats in the open air at 11 a.m. — every day, rain or shine,
through all of it. Papadakis half-expected someone from Parks and Recreation to come over and shut them down. Instead, one morning the worker whose route took him through the park stopped to watch. There was no trash to collect. The bathrooms didn’t need restocking. He looked at Papadakis and asked, quietly, if it was okay if he stretched a little. Of course it was.
“That’s what this is,” she said. “It’s so simple. You hold the space,
and people find their connection.”
Papadakis came to yoga by a longer road than most. She grew up dancing — seriously, training alongside fellow San Pedro native Missy Copeland in a rigorous juvenile ballet program — and was raised in a family that ran Papadakis Taverna in San Pedro for over 35 years, a restaurant where, as she puts it, every night felt like a party. She went on to become
a choreographer and then, in a pivot she now describes as something between ambition and naivety, a civil litigator. She practiced law in Los Angeles and San Francisco for years, teaching yoga on the side to keep her body and mind intact, before the pandemic gave her what she calls the hard shift she needed. She has not looked back.
On April 1, 2021, Kefi Yoga opened at 23812 Crenshaw Blvd. in Torrance.
The studio now has eight instructors — all of them, Papadakis says, teachers who are also perpetual students, their egos checked at the door. Kefi has paid for all of them to pursue their 500-hour certifications, an unusual investment for a studio of its size. One instructor, Sunina Mishra, came directly from the Mysore school in India and leads mantra and pranayama classes in Sanskrit — a practice that some corporate studios have quietly banned. “As long as I can support it, I will,” Papadakis said.
The studio offers up to nine classes a day, from restorative yin to heated
Sculpt combining weights with vinyasa, most rooms warmed to between 90 and 105 degrees. On weekends, Papadakis’s husband, who roasts his own organic single-origin beans under the Kefi Coffee label, brews fresh coffee for students after class. There is always iced tea and crisp apples.
First-timers get three classes for three dollars, because Papadakis believes
the door should open for everyone.
The ambitions keep expanding. Sunday kids’ yoga runs while parents practice. A chair-based class for elderly and injured students is in development. A formal teacher training program is being built. Community partnerships with CASA of Los Angeles and the Palos Verdes school district bring yoga to children in the juvenile justice system and to kids who might otherwise be sitting alone at recess.
“I really believe that if everyone had yoga in their lives, the world would
be a better place,” Papadakis said. “And with everything happening with AI
and technology, we have to connect with our own humanity to keep that part of ourselves sacred. It’s the only thing that differentiates us.”
That Easy Reader readers chose Kefi as the best yoga studio in the South
Bay is no surprise to anyone who has walked through the door. Kefi is not
a place you go to do yoga. It’s a place you go to remember what you are.
Kefi Yoga
23812 Crenshaw Blvd., Torrance
(310) 683-5605
