I used to think yoga was just woo-woo. Then, in 2009, my mom was given one month to live and asked me to join her for yoga classes at the cancer hospital in Texas.
We spent the first class lying down on the floor, covered in blankets and propped up with bolsters. We did nothing but breathe. In the second class, we did some chair yoga and in the third we meditated most of the time.
To my surprise, the sessions worked miracles! They felt like little islands of peace and calm in a vast ocean of stress and uncertainty. Three months later, mom had beaten the cancer and I felt like a completely different person.
Back home, I decided to keep going. At first, I stumbled into the Yin classes of a friend of a friend. When two sessions per week weren’t enough anymore, I also started to go to her Hatha classes and was completely blown away. Who would have thought that yoga could be more intense than just lounging around in delightfully relaxing poses for an hour?!
The more I learned to strengthen my body and breath on the mat, the more curious I became about the origins and spiritual aspects of yoga. Eventually, a friend told me that there is this thing called "YTT" where you do yoga all day long for a month. My only response was "Where can I sign up?"
A few weeks later I found myself in an Indian *ashram* ready to begin my first 200 hour training. On the one hand, the training was everything I had wished for. It gave me a thorough education in yoga history, philosophy, spirituality, meditation, and breathwork.
But with regard to yoga asana and teaching methodology, the course was a complete disaster. We only practiced one set of poses which we repeated every single day. And we didn’t get any training on how to teach the poses. What is more, the instructors forced us into positions that we weren’t ready for. They pushed my knees down in lotus pose. They leaned on my back with hands and knees until my forehead finally touched the floor in seated forward folds. And when brute force didn’t help either, they made fun of us and shamed us for our lack of discipline and strength.
When the training was over, I left the ashram feeling inspired, a tiny bit enlightened, and full of wonder. But also confused, disheartened and with a permanent knee injury.
Back at home, my friends begged me to teach them yoga (most of them had back pain from sitting at their desks all day). I resisted because my “teacher training” hadn’t actually prepared me to teach yoga. But after months of pressure, I finally gave in and decided to try it anyway.
As you can imagine, things didn’t go so well. I didn’t know what to say besides calling out the names of the poses. I had no idea how to sequence a proper yoga class. And I couldn’t support my students in any meaningful way.
My helplessness was most glaring when they asked me questions after class. Our conversations would go like this: “I can’t get into Lotus pose. Not even Half Lotus. Why is that?” - “I don’t know, sorry.” - “I love Wheel and want to get deeper into the pose. What can I do?” - “Ummm, I guess keep practicing?!” - “I have back horrible back pain. Which poses will help me get that under control?” - “This sounds like something Google would know.”
So there I was, a certified yoga teacher with no clue how to teach yoga. In order to fill the gasping gaps in my knowledge, I invested everything I earned as an English teacher and studied with the world’s top yoga instructors. I also got certified in Thai Massage, Prenatal yoga, and hired a physiotherapist to teach me everything they knew about how the human body works.
In parallel, I kept up my meditation practice at the local Buddhist Temple and at home 6 days a week, and continued my study of the ancient spiritual texts of yoga. A few years and 30 thousand dollars later I finally felt like I was ready to teach really good yoga classes.
I was teaching at a local studio in Berlin, Germany. And one evening, after a sweaty Vinyasa class a student whom I had never seen in class before asked if I would like to become the face of one of the largest online yoga platforms in the world DoYouYoga.
At this point in time, I had never spent more than 10 dollars on yoga pants. I had never taken a yoga class online. And never in my wildest dreams had I thought of becoming a full-time yoga teacher. And all of a sudden I was catapulted from my tiny studio space that could fit 12 people onto an international yoga platform with millions of subscribers from all over the world.
The first program that I filmed was a free 30 day challenge which I believe you can still find on Youtube for free. It was successful and so I went on to create more than a dozen online yoga programs for DoYou and - later - also for YouAligned. Suddenly, students who I’d never met in my life began writing to me. They asked me about retreats and teacher trainings. And so I began to travel and teach internationally, leading my first retreat in Morocco in 2015.
To this day, I have completed 8 YTTs and 23 specialty programs with world-renowned instructors, taught more than 3.500 yoga classes in every imaginable setting, lead trainings, workshops and retreats on 5 continents, and talked to hundreds of fellow yoga teachers.
Here’s what I’ve learned:
- Yoga is the single most powerful practice that exists.
- Getting a really good yoga education is much harder than it should be.
- There is a disconnect between the Movement and the Wisdom of yoga.
When I realized these things in 2019, almost exactly 10 years after I had entered the yogic path, I knew that it was time to start my own yoga school.
I embarked on a mission to close the gap between Movement and Wisdom (hence the name).
I wanted to make it really easy for my students to get the deep, diverse and well-rounded yoga education that I worked so hard to find. And I wanted to let them experience transformational power of yoga, so that they could help others do the same.
That’s why I’m here.
I would be honored to welcome you into the Movement Wisdom community of dedicated yogis and aspiring teachers very soon!
