LaRayia Gaston is in the kitchen. One hand holds a pan simmering vegan tikka masala, while the other rides firmly on top of a blender as it churns almonds into milk. On an early October afternoon in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles, Gaston maneuvers through her kitchen’s chaos.
Glossy bunches of Dino kale and collard greens spill across the counter tops. Nuts, seeds, grains, teas and powdered herbs line the walls in large glass jars, and Erykah Badu blasts from speakers.
The space stirs with people: Gaston’s friends, employees, health-conscious professionals on their lunch breaks, homeless people whom Gaston greets by name as they come in for their meals.
Clad in an oversized t-shirt, ripped leggings and Nike sneakers with her bleached-blonde dreadlocks tucked beneath a headband, Gaston explains the place and its origins, starting with a marathon circuit of investor pitches.
“Everyone thought I was stupid. They were like: ‘Why don’t you just open a regular vegan cafe?’” Gaston recounts, sitting down at one of the shop’s mismatched wooden tables. The early fall sun seeps in through the windows, bathing the space in hues of orange and gold.
“What would be the point of that?” she asks. “We’re creating access here.”
In August, Gaston opened LaRayia’s Bodega borne of her wish to blend her passion for wellness and holistic healing with a drive to help Los Angeles’ inner city population.
The concept is to offer organic and vegan meals at affordable prices (which, in the era of $12 avocado toast, is revolutionary). The bodega’s Instagram bio reads “$1 Organic Mercado,” an intentional play on the 99-cent Store. She serves full entrees for $5 and stocks things you would find at a traditional bodega. But instead of Doritos, there is unprocessed organic granola; instead of soda, there are fresh fruit and vegetable juices. Most of the products are donated by grocery stores, restaurants and natural foods companies.
While this is Gaston’s first brick and mortar, she is a seasoned business owner. Love Without Reason, the nonprofit she founded four years ago, also runs an ongoing meal program, Lunch On Me, that serves 10,000 meals a month to the homeless on Skid Row. You can see the ethos of her nonprofit explicated on the Bodega’s walls: Trump-red hats, declaring, “Make America Love Again,” hang alongside t-shirts bearing the words, “Love Without Reason.” Mugs imprinted with “Lunch on Me” are also for sale.
Gaston, who is 31, lives by “following the joy,” as she puts it. Her career history reads like a laundry list of childhood dreams: professional dancer, fashion designer, model, actress, vegan chef, social entrepreneur, inspirational speaker, and now, shop and cafe owner. She quit each endeavor as soon as she was no longer happy doing it, she says. Her fashion line was especially lucrative, but when the “joy ran out,” she shut it down, refunding $10,000 of orders in a month.
You could say she is monomaniacal in her focus. “I take things one day at a time and don’t think about anything else outside of that. I use my time, all day and all night, like it’s not promised,” she says before adding, “And everything I do is divinely guided. I am deeply, deeply connected spiritually. To God.”
Variations on Gaston’s life philosophy are currently ubiquitous. Author Marie Kondo’s “KonMari” method is based on a similar idea—“live a life that sparks joy.” With two NY Times best-selling books, a Netflix series, and a Goop-esque online store, her success suggests the trend: people want to live intentional lives. Gaston’s perspective is right in line—do the things you love, stop them when you stop loving them.
Simple, yes; easy to do, decidedly not. While society feeds us messages like “work is supposed to be work,” and “finish what you started,” Gaston embodies something different.
“What would the world be like if everyone really lived up to their full potential?” she asks.
The sentiment is pure Gaston. She skips small talk and dives straight into the burning questions like, “why am I on this earth?” and, “how can I best serve the world?”
Her Twitter feed is an assortment of musings on spirituality and self-improvement, including, “I hope everyone gets to experience the friendships that talk with their eyes.” She offers astute advice: “Whatever you are not changing, you’re choosing,” and shares esoteric poetry mostly about love: “I wanna talk future with you / know you like your coffee and order for two.”
Money does not seem to be a factor in “following the joy” for Gaston. She’s experienced homelessness herself and “lives really simply now,” she says, gesturing at her outfit, emphasizing the rips in her leggings. Her home, when she is not at the Bodega or on extensive media tours—she appeared on Good Morning America earlier this year—is a small apartment in Koreatown.
“I haven’t been homeless since 21,” she says, knocking her knuckles on the wooden table. These days, Gaston does not take a paycheck from her non-profit and supports herself exclusively through speaking gigs.
Gaston was born in Brooklyn to a Jamaican mother and a French-Irish father, but it was her grandmother who raised her. The eldest of eight children, she grew up with little means and spent a lot of time playing on the streets, being “very, very rebellious,” she says.
Mostly, she made art. “I painted. I wrote. I danced. I did everything in art,” she says. “Art was an outlet, a refuge, a way to make people feel, which is all I ever wanted to do.”
About the traumatic events that she says occurred during her childhood, she does not wish to be specific. “Let’s just say all of my worst nightmares happened at a really young age.”
She does share that for most of her childhood, she struggled with health issues. At 19, she found herself on nine different prescription medications and in and out of the hospital with a serious thyroid disorder. Due to what she calls a moment of “divine knowledge,” she went vegan and was able to get off all of her medications within months. Through nourishing plant-based foods—like the superfood cereals and hempseed granolas and fresh fruit and vegetable juices that are sold at the bodega—she healed herself.
On a recent Monday evening this fall, Gaston hosted a talk at the bodega by Shaman Durek, a sixth generation African shaman (who is close friends with Gwyneth Paltrow and has 144,000 Instagram followers). Every square inch of the space filled with people—standing, sitting in chairs, on the floor, squatting, in the back, and spilling onto the sidewalk.
Durek, speaking into a gold microphone, addressed the crowd. His words are steady, resounding, in the cadence of a preacher’s sermon: “When I met LaRayia and looked into her eyes, I saw a vision in her. And I asked Spirit, ‘How can I help bring this vision to life?’”
The audience was transfixed. It was a diverse group of whimsically well-dressed artist types: women hailing from Venice Beach in wide-brimmed hats, homeless men in tattered flannel shirts with their dogs curled beside them, a singer who would be hosting her album release party at the bodega later that week, Koreatown locals with their children and a group of short-haired women wearing leather jackets and spiked chains, sipping bright-colored juices.
“We need more spaces like this. This is where healing happens,” Durek continued. “Healing is for everyone. Food is for everyone.”
He nodded to a slow and steady pulse for a long pause, panning the space as tears welled in the corners of his eyes. “This is the vision,” he affirmed.
The bodega is a respected staple by its neighbors in the Westlake community, where it is wedged beside a panderia and a papuseria that have been there for decades. That, too, is part of the vision. Oscar, who owns the Salvadoran restaurant next door (and declines to share his last name), says that in the three months since LaRayia’s Bodega, there has been none of the community tension one might expect given the bodega’s nature, which the New York Times described as looking “like a harbinger of the sort of gentrification it is designed to fight.”
Indeed local shop owners frequent the bodega, grabbing a cup of coffee, lunch, or a fresh juice. Most of them greet Gaston with enormous hugs.
“All of this stuff she’s done, I’m not surprised,” says Tanya Brooks, a playwright, director, and the Chief Financial Officer of Lunch on Me, who has known Gaston for ten years. “She is very clear in her mission, of what her life is meant to be.”
On the first day they met, Gaston was auditioning for a part in Brooks’ play. In the middle of her reading, Gaston began to cry because she resonated so deeply with the character. Brooks gave her the lead part on the spot. “She moves on such a spiritual plane, with such positive energy. I knew there was such vision in her,” Brooks says. “She has no fear. I mean none.”
Brooks admits that the other cast members were jealous of Gaston, and that, in general, people can be intimidated by her. “People think that because she’s good looking—goddess gorgeous, as I always say—she’s had it easy. But it’s not true. She’s fought incredibly hard for everything she’s achieved and will achieve. She was homeless when I met her,” she says.
Ten years ago, when Gaston moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles at the moment the wellness industry was exploding, she was struck by the disparity of the city’s landscape—on the Westside, pilates and raw food; downtown, the densest homeless population in the country.
Right around the time when kombucha-on-tap hit Whole Foods in 2008, the nation was dealing with widespread anxiety on the heels of the subprime mortgage crisis that caused the worst recession since the Great Depression. As Taffy Brodesser-Akner put in her article on Gwenyth Paltrow’s Goop: “Wellness was maybe a result of too much having it all, too much pursuit, too many boxes that we’d seen our exhausted mothers fall into bed without checking off. Wellness arrived because it was gravely needed.”
What started out as a chance for people, mostly women, to take a break from capitalism’s rat race and social pressures to do-it-all, quickly became another box to check and a $4.2 trillion market. The beauty industry has always fed itself on women’s physical insecurities. The wellness industry, though, is more thorough, targeting mind, body and spirit, revealing itself through Instagram influencers meditating in the morning while burning a specific $60 candle; billboards of beaming women holding green smoothies to promote powdered collagen; supplements in alluring packaging that promise you’ll never get tired again; Lululemon.
Gaston’s work, then, is an antidote to the wellness industry’s consumerism. She wonders: “How can all of this green juice and crystals and reiki healers exist in the same city as these people suffering with diabetes, in wheelchairs, on Skidrow?”
The homeless population in Los Angeles is rising; L.A. officials are even trying to declare a state of emergency over it. Currently, there are about 44,000 residents in Los Angeles county living outdoors. In July, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority reported an 11% increase in the residents living on Skid Row since last year, with over 4,500 individuals living in tents within the fifty city-block neighborhood.
Last year, Gaston spent 43 days living in a tent on Skid Row as part of a documentary she directed, which is scheduled for release in 2020. She told the New York Times that the film is her response to a spiritual message she received from her recently deceased grandmother, who told her: “Go to Skid Row, pitch a tent.”
“You gotta be able to look at where it’s ugly,” she says, adding that the most important part about everything she does is that the people with whom she works are genuinely happy. “Wait,” she suddenly bursts, addressing a staff member in the bodega, “V, are you happy?”
“V” or Venus Nari is president of Lunch On Me. She crouches on the kitchen’s floor, restocking some items. “What?”
“Are you happy?!”
Nari pops up, face flushed. “Oh, yeah I’m happy. I wouldn’t be here if I weren’t.”
“It really all boils down to empathy,” Gaston continues saying later, tidying up after the lunch rush has petered out. “My grandmother taught me that. She was so different from me, like—really buttoned up, clean, proper, all that. I was this dirty art kid getting into all sorts of crazy shit.”
She realigns some of the crystals that have gone askew while giving a thumbs up through the window to her friend, who is creating a make-shift stage for the bodega poetry slam the next night.
“Throughout all my seasons and changes, my grandmother never looked at me differently,” she adds. “That’s the power of unconditional love.”
Abruptly, a tall and stunning woman whooshes in off the street, plants her leg on a table, whips her head back and fakes a mini-burlesque routine. The whole room explodes with laughter.
“That’s Jerrie, she’s my most extra regular,” Gaston proclaims.
Jerrie struts to the refrigerator like it’s her runway, grabs a juice and says, “This place is magic, isn’t it?”
LaRayia’s Bodega, 2713 W 6th Street in Los Angeles, is open Monday through Friday 10am to 10pm, and Saturday and Sunday 10am to midnight. (818) 357-9114