Jenna-Leigh Hoffmann has spun her life’s learning into information for others.
Many in La Jolla can be called sun-chasers, always after the next ray to warm and uplift spirits. But there’s a science behind that, a link between sunshine and wellbeing, local yoga instructor and health coach Jenna-Leigh Hoffmann says.
For Hoffmann, sunshine is a way of life, a passion so bright she recently published a book to share her knowledge, simultaneously shifting her business, State of Sun, into a full-time effort.
State of Sun began as “a global retreat business” to help people from around the world experience “what it would be like to drop yourself into nature [and] fine tune your health through nutrition,” behaviors grounded in the practice of yoga and movement, Hoffmann said.
In June, Hoffmann, realizing that “community was being lost as soon as the retreat ended,” endeavored to make State of Sun full-time, localized in partnership with different La Jolla hotels and businesses.
Through State of Sun, Hoffmann, who is involved with and teaches yoga at two La Jolla studios, hosts events at local spots like the La Jolla Woman’s Club, creating day wellness retreats to connect people with those in their community and cultivate relationships and events that “create that sunshine state of mind.”
“Reconnecting to the sun allows us to understand how we’re tuned biologically and how we can get back to that more balanced state of being,” said Hoffmann, who is an integrative nutrition and functional health coach along with having taught yoga for 10 years.
Understanding the body through yoga, she added, can also impart lessons about balance in other aspects of life.
The book, “Becoming Sunshine,” was a project born and nurtured in La Jolla.
About three years ago as a new resident to San Diego, Hoffmann began to notice her “body and mind were thriving,” she said, connecting her health to the exposure to the sun.
The connection, realized while Hoffmann sat at Parakeet Cafe in La Jolla, led to the idea for “Becoming Sunshine.”
The book, launched at a party at La Valencia, begins as a historical examination of “our human evolution around the sun,” she said, and then “transforms into a practical, multidisciplinary guide for how we achieve that optimal state of being.”
In publishing “Becoming Sunshine,” Hoffmann’s goal “was for people to gain awareness of our partnership with the sun,” she said. “We have those tools inside of us to flip that switch and elevate that sunny disposition.”
As nearly half of Americans are deficient in Vitamin D, sleep and exercise, Hoffman said, the book brings “awareness to all of these things that are inextricably linked.”
The sun, she said, is “our biological roadmap to realign those things.”
Hoffmann found her own state of sun via life experience. Born in Durban, South Africa, she moved with her family to Kentucky and then Florida. Hoffmann moved to San Diego after craving “a similar place to where I was born, and San Diego is so similar to Durban,” she said.
Hoffmann, a “crazy athlete” who began with the modern pentathlon (running, swimming, fencing, shooting and equestrian show jumping), then became involved in yoga as a form of recovery, she said.
Now an avid Ironman triathlete, Hoffmann has learned the importance of a “multidisciplinary approach” to wellness and incorporating knowledge about how the sun “impacts our lives in every single regard,” she said, including sleep, nutrition, movement, emotions, relationships and self-regulation.
“Get your health back to alignment, … regulate your mood, and … find those other people in your community that can help to get that elevated state of being.”
