Letting go of self criticism on and off the mat
What drives you to the yoga mat?
Maybe you want a temporary escape from your busy life. Maybe you want to be closer to the earth. Maybe you want to get more flexible. Maybe you want to master a yoga asana and post a picture on Instagram.…
Healing negative body image
A round belly is a happy belly
At the end of each yoga class, I guide students through a self-massage. These last five minutes are always quite special for me. Massage not only distributes the chi, or life energy evenly throughout the body,…
Why yoga is about self-inquiry, not self-improvement
Embrace who you are right now
As long as our orientation is toward perfection or success, we will never learn about unconditional friendship with ourselves, nor will we find compassion. – Pema Chödrön
Ugly duck syndrome
The famous fairy…
The value of silence
There is a power and beauty in silence. In the classical yoga tradition, the Sanskrit word Mauna means silence, and it’s said silence helps a yogi purify her mind; it clears the detritus floating on its surface. This is why many yogis take…
Breath Practice in Dynamic Mindfulness Yoga
Breath is our most intimate connection with life.
It enters us when we’re born and it leaves us when we die. It’s a constant exchange between the inner and outer spaces. It is a simple yet powerful demonstration of how deeply interdependent…
Is More Necessary the Better?
A Holistic Yoga Practice for Hypermobility
Looking back, I sometimes think that if my mum would have put me into a circus when I was a kid, by I could now be one of those performers we call “snake-human” in German (aka Schlangenmensch):…
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your…
From Mindless Stretching to Mindful Movement
Can a goal ever justify the means?
Can striving to achieve a yoga pose, regardless of how you get there, lead to a nourishing and sustainable yoga practice? After almost two decades of practice, I can assure you that it cannot. Quite…
Thai massage – a spiritual hands-on gem
My alarm clock breaks the serene silence in the old guest house. 6AM. I look around my room and for a second I envy my co-travelers - an early morning alarm clearly seems to belong to their past. It is early April and I have just completed…
From Self Conscious to Self Aware
When it comes to the body, from early on we are bombarded with different, often quite confusing messages. We are cultured thought our schooling and media to judge our bodies according to some outer criteria: how it performs at given tasks, how…
Walk Slowly, by Danna Faulds
It only takes a reminder to breathe,
a moment to be still, and just like that,
something in me settles, softens,
makes space for imperfection.
The harsh voice of judgment drops to a whisper
and I remember again that life isn’t a relay…
The Quest for Mindfulness – MEETING YOUR EDGE
What does it mean to meet your edge? How do you know when you have met your edge? When you finally meet your edge, what do you do?
I will take you on a small detour and return to these questions, with answers that have surfaced recently…