Krystia Rae was on her skateboard, headphones in, coasting through an alley in La Jolla's Bird Rock neighborhood, when a trash truck came around the corner. She never heard it coming.
"I had a split second to decide what to do, because they weren't going to be able to stop," Rae says. "I just flew over the alley."
It happened days before the grand reopening of Lavande Vitality House, the wellness center Rae founded five years ago and has spent the past several months remodeling and rebranding. It was also, the second time in recent years she'd come face to face with her own mortality, with the first being a cancer diagnosis that arrived not long after her marriage ended.
"Getting cancer and being faced with my mortality really allowed me to see how precious life is, and to see how out of alignment I was, giving my time and energy to things that didn't actually matter," Rae says. "I was like, what matters to me? It's my business, creating impact and change in humanity. That's deeply, deeply a part of who I am. And my children. And then also myself — doing things that light me up, that make me feel good, because I matter too. I'm not meant to only serve."
The alley accident, jarring as it was, arrived at an unusually tender moment. That same morning, Rae says, a stream of longtime clients and community members had shown up at Lavande unprompted, each telling her how the space had changed their life.
"They found their soul sister friends, or whatever healing they had," Rae says. "It felt like the universe was just showing me all this stuff right before the opening."
Lavande Vitality House founder Krystia Rae
Lavande has long offered energy work, breathwork and healing sessions, along with rotating readers offering angel, tarot, astrology and psychic readings. What's changing is the scope and emphasis on “vitality” as a core aspect of the brand.
"It was always about wellness, healing, transformation, but why?" Rae says. "So we can live well now. It doesn't matter how long you live if you're not living."
Coming this fall are morning fitness classes, including yoga and Pilates, along with a neighborhood walking club. The additions, she says, are a response to a community that had outgrown the center's original, purely energetic offerings.
"We've been so emotional and spiritual but to really bring the body in is so important," Rae says. "You need to move the energy through the body, not just let it sit and be stagnant, which is what so many of us do, sitting at our computers all day."
Even the new fitness classes are being built around Lavande's core philosophy rather than a typical studio format. Instructors have been asked to let students go deeper into stillness at the end of class and classes won't be scheduled back to back, instead leaving room for people to linger.
"This is about connection, about community," she says. "People want that, especially when you're going deep into an experience — you don't want to be rushed out the door."
To support that, the remodel includes a refresh of its signature café, serving plant-based coffee and matcha, complete with plush pink couches and a soft, cozy decor. The wellness sanctuary also has dedicated outdoor patio the team calls an "integration zone," a quiet space for journaling and grounding after a session.
"The sessions have gone so deep that the energetics of the space really changed," Rae says. "People can't just go back out on the road. We need them to have time to journal, come back to their body."
The physical remodel had its own difficult beginning. Rae says an earlier contractor took payment upfront and abandoned the project, leaving the space in disarray. Community members stepped in to help rebuild by hand, she says, before she ultimately hired a new contractor to finish the job.
That new contractor, she says, became an unexpected creative partner by offering a kind of support she hadn't experienced building the business the first time around. One idea, born out of that collaboration, has become a defining feature of the new Lavande: an entire room filled with rose quartz, including a wall built collectively by the community that incorporates handwritten love letters from clients.
"I already had the love letters coming in, and he said, 'What if we invite them in, and they help us build the wall?'" Rae recalls. "And they did. And so now this room is the frequency of that love."
Rae's own transformation runs through the rebrand as much as the architecture does. After her cancer diagnosis, Rae confronted what she described as her biggest fear — public speaking — by traveling to Australia to train at a speaking institute, then taking the stage for the first time while in the middle of her divorce.
"I was scared to death," she says. "But I did it, and I've been speaking ever since."
She's now writing a book built around a phrase she repeats often with clients: that everyone carries a permission slip to live fully, whether or not they ever get a diagnosis that forces the question.
"Are you going to wait for the diagnosis to sign it," she says, "or are you going to live today?"
Lavande Vitality House is located in Bird Rock at 5544 La Jolla Blvd, La Jolla. New fitness offerings are expected to launch this Fall.
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