Do you remember why you first stepped onto a yoga mat? Was it for the physical practice, or were you after something underneath it? When someone says yoga nowadays, we assume asanas straight away. But as you know, being a yogi goes beyond the mat.
Getting there is another matter though, and it’s rarely a straight line.
I teach both sides, the postures and the mind on its own, and people sometimes ask how I got from one to the other. It started with boredom.
I came to yoga in the nineties while I was dealing with the aftermath of a car accident. I started looking for a yoga teacher in Zürich. That was before there were yoga studios, before yoga was popular, which meant ads in the paper and the yellow pages.
First class I found, we had to lie down with a rose petal up one nostril, trying to breathe past it. Not really what I was looking for.
So I looked for another teacher and that one turned out to teach in the backroom of a restaurant, where my aunt and I were the only two students. He sat on a big pillow and shouted instructions at us. This wasn’t a success either.
Then a friend took me to an Ashtanga class with a serious, dedicated teacher, Bruno Dietziker, and after that one class I knew this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
I’ve had a few of those moments in my life, where I knew right away, this is it, this is right for me.
Soon I was teaching yoga myself, although I never planned to. In 2005 I went to Mysore for the first time to practise with Pattabhi Jois and Sharath Jois, and three months became a year.
I moved to London the year after, and once I’d spent a year teaching classes where the travelling took longer than the teaching itself, I decided to open my own studio. I ran Yoga Creation for eleven years, with seven teachers and a daily morning Mysore programme, until the pandemic ended it.
So for most of my adult life the practice was one of the pillars of my life, stepping on the mat in the morning, sitting on the cushion, and the discipline of it wasn’t always easy, but it was part of it.
And then a few years ago my life came apart, outer circumstances and grief and severe anxiety all at once. My mind was in overdrive day and night, I had no energy for any of it, and the practices were out of reach for me. I couldn’t sit on the cushion, I couldn’t step on the mat.
That’s as much of it as I’ll put here.
What I found in that gap is what I teach now. It wasn’t a new technique, I had plenty of those. What changed is that my whole day became the practice, instead of only the mat or the cushion, and it was available in the middle of whatever was happening.
Tools like ten seconds of attention on the soles of my feet, a few breaths with the exhale twice as long as the inhale. Noticing what had been triggered in me as it happened and dealing with it there, rather than saving it up to be dealt with later.
This wasn’t a workaround, and it wasn’t something I’d invented in a crisis. It’s what the Yoga Sutras are actually about, seeing what the mind has constructed, and dissolving the patterns underneath.
What that chapter of my life changed was how deeply I came to understand the practices, and the sutras. I let nothing come between the experience and myself, no TV, no distractions, no postponing, I took it all away and dealt with everything as it came. And that’s when I saw for myself what the Inner Practice can actually do.
So when I write about the mind, this is where it comes from, and it isn’t a departure from the physical yoga. The mat was always the doorway.
Everything the mind does when life gets loud, the boredom, the comparison, the wanting to leave, is already there in a practice, which is why I think Ashtanga people tend to recognise this work quickly once they look at it.
If you’d like to read more about that side of the work, it’s here: the Inner Practice, yoga for the mind