Jacqui Burge

Jacqui Burge knows how to break a habit. From competitive figure skater to punk rock singer, and from heroin addict to virtual wellness trailblazer, she’s learned a thing or two about starting fresh. I spoke to her at her Desk Yogi studio in downtown Ojai.

Every day at noon, Jacqui Burge hosts a free, 15-minute, virtual wellness class. It’s available to anyone, anywhere and requires no yoga mat or fancy props because it’s entirely doable from a desk. An accessible yet effective workout, the class epitomizes Jacqui and her Ojai-based startup Desk Yogi’s ethos, which is to empower the overworked to claim back their bodies.

As the founder and CEO of Desk Yogi, Jacqui has created a unique online wellness platform designed specifically to help to offset the toll a busy work life can take on our minds, bodies and souls. With a large selection of video and audio content that ranges from yoga and guided meditation to strengthening exercises and breath work, its goal is simple: to assist people in taking short but powerful breaks and make them feel better. Many of the workout sessions are just five minutes long. “A huge shift can happen in five minutes,” Jacqui insists. “Anyone can do that.”

*Jacqui in front of the Move Sanctuary, home of Desk Yogi. Photo by Simone Noble*

Jacqui and I meet outside the Desk Yogi Studio on East Matilija Street in the heart of downtown Ojai, a space that, due to Covid-19, has so far been used only for Zoom classes and filming. We sit in the yard outside, a tranquil, secret garden, hidden away from the bustle of the busy street that’s lined with shops, restaurants and galleries. Tall and imposing, Jacqui almost instantly strikes me as a paradox. Kind and considerate, with a soft vulnerability to her, she gently asks me if I need anything, and thoughtfully pauses my audio recorder during various disruptions to our conversation. But she’s fierce too, with physical strength and doggedness she puts down to being a natural-born athlete. “I’d like it to be different; I’d love to be a poet or an ingénue, someone chilled and really mellow, but I’m not. I’m a highly competitive, deeply driven athlete. And whenever I try to fight against my true nature, I lose.”

Born and raised in Studio City, Los Angeles, Jacqui, now 53, describes herself as one of the original Valley Girls. A child actress who played various incarnations of Jackie Onassis (the resemblance is uncanny) on sets including ABC dramas and the Roseanne Barr show, she says her childhood neighborhood was idyllic. And yet, her home life was not. “My parents had a really ugly divorce and my mom was crazy,” she proffers. Her mother suffered from bipolar disease and anorexia, she explains, a lethal combination that made their relationship increasingly difficult as Jacqui became of age. She escaped by devoting herself to figure skating at the age of 12, leaving regular school to attend a special academy for athletes, and spending up to eight hours a day on the ice. “All I did was skate and compete, skate and compete. I loved it so much.”

But her skating days came to an abrupt end when, aged 15, Jacqui’s mother moved them lock, stock and barrel to Washington, D. C., and could no longer afford the expensive sport. “It was very sudden and very hard,” Jacqui recalls. “I was devastated and felt like I hadn’t been part of the decision-making process at all. And that made me very angry.” Then, two years later, Jacqui found out she was adopted, with her biological family – her parents and younger sister – living in Carpinteria and Ojai. The news, coupled with her mom’s increasingly volatile mental health, made their relationship so toxic that Jacqui left the family home on her 18th birthday. She spent the last few months of high school in her best friend’s laundry room, before leaving for New York City, where, after a short stint at the exclusive Sarah Lawrence College upstate, she threw herself into the punk scene and everything that came with it.

*Jacqui (third from the right) and STP, the all-girl punk band that toured with Nirvana & Sonic Youth*

In 1990, Jacqui founded an all-girl punk rock band called STP, which saw an unexpectedly rapid rise to success, touring with Nirvana and Sonic Youth and producing an album with Kim Gordon. But her world was about to take another turn yet again when, on the verge of signing a deal with Geffen Records, STP’s lead guitarist was given an unwelcome ultimatum. “Her boyfriend told her it was him or the band and she chose him,” she explains. “I guess it was one of those burn bright and burn out things. But it was a really magical time, and as much as all the partying was life destroying, it was also life affirming.”

Things did get dark, though. Jacqui admits that a “giant drug habit” eventually caught up with her in a bad way. “I was this young, angry woman with severe self-worth issues thrown into the punk rock culture of the time, and it was just the perfect petri dish for a heroin addiction,” she confides. “I crashed and burned and destroyed everything. And I mean everything. Because when you’re addicted to drugs, nothing else matters.”

A “God moment” led to her getting clean. “This internal voice I’d never heard before told me that if I didn’t stop doing drugs, I’d die.” She kicked her habit in a matter of weeks, and in 1994, aged just 25, moved back to Los Angeles, where her rock n’ roll life continued for a number of years, albeit sober. She started a series of bands with “the guys from Tool and Guns N’ Roses,” had a brief marriage with the bassist of Pigmy Love Circus and “lived the Beachwood Canyon dream.” And then, one day in 2000, Jacqui changed everything. “I’d thrown my back out really badly and a friend told me to go see a guy who was doing this thing called rope yoga from his garage. I went there and never left.” The guy was renowned fitness and life consultant Gudni Gunnarsson, with whom Jacqui went on to train and apprentice. She became a yoga instructor, massage therapist and raw food chef, swapping her guitar for a yoga mat and fully embracing a life of health and wellness.

Fast forward three years, and Jacqui, now a new mother, moved to Ojai. “I didn’t want my daughter to grow up in the back of a car,” she says. “I’d been to Ojai to see my biological family and I’d done a few wellness courses here. But the move was sudden, I came to visit my family for Fourth of July and by August I was renting a house here. I loved being in a quiet, small town and bringing my daughter up here.” She continued to teach yoga locally for some years, opened a French restaurant called Iron Pan, which she admits “failed miserably” and finally joined online learning platform Lynda.com (now LinkedIn Learning), where she worked for seven years in its offices, first in Ojai and later in Carpinteria, which involved an hour-long commute every day.

It was there that she had the idea for Desk Yogi after finding herself both physically and mentally exhausted by her intense corporate job. “You get fat and stressed doing office work,” she explains, adding that by then, as a single mom of two young children (her son Nikolai was born in 2006), she had zero opportunity for self-care. “You end up totally out of touch with your body, like a mashed potato, and you have no time to work out or do anything about it.” She started a weekly yoga class at the office, but when nobody came because nobody had the time, she took it online, launching a 15-minute “yoga mash-up,” combining yoga, stretching, meditation and breathwork. The class maxed out each week, with hundreds of people joining. Eventually, Jacqui decided to focus on desk-bound wellness full-time.

*Jacqui filming for her company Desk Yogi - Photo by Simone Noble*

Desk Yogi launched in 2015 as one of the first in the field. From chair workouts focused on back, neck and upper body strength to relief from screen-induced eye strain, guided meditation, breath work and even healthy office meal plans, the company’s multifaceted work-based wellness program is accessible, interactive and fun. And like many online businesses, it has been able to flourish during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Of course, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing and like any company, there were teething troubles and growing pains, including the devastating Thomas Fire which forced two of her partners to leave the business after losing their homes, and the closure of Jacqui’s initial Ojai studio, the Move Sanctuary, due to the pandemic. However, more than five years in, with a shiny new studio that’s soon to open to the public, and with clients including LinkedIn, Takeda, Crown Media, Liberty Lending and Allstate Insurance, as well as a growing number of subscribers across the globe, Desk Yogi’s success has seen Jacqui become a leading voice in the expanding corporate wellness industry.

But it’s not all Pranayama and Namaste, and Jacqui has not deserted her punk rock roots entirely. She recently recorded a new album called Punk Rock Heart with her band, Squirrel Suicide, produced by Grammy award-winning sound designer Todd Hannigan, with her 18-year-old daughter Ava singing backing vocals. And with her PunkWellness series of talks on “radical self-care,” she continues to seamlessly bring together opposite extremes. “I’m like that,” Jacqui asserts. “I’ve always been on both sides of everything. Some people are really uncomfortable with that, but that’s ok. I have always followed my own path.

Article Published June 2021

Aubrey Balkind

Danny Everett