I came to yoga a long time ago.
Not because I wanted to become a yoga teacher.
And certainly not because I had a plan.
I simply kept practising.
One year became another. Teachers came into my life. Some of them belonged to an older generation of this lineage, and I was fortunate to learn from them while that way of teaching was still very much alive.
India became part of my life.
The practice changed. My body changed. My life changed.
And so did my understanding of yoga.
What I learned from those teachers was not only a sequence of postures. It was a way of learning that required time, repetition, patience and relationship.
And years of introspection and reflection.
Because eventually the practice asks you to look beyond the sequence and towards yourself.
Some of what I learned I still carry with me every day.
Some of it I have questioned.
And some of it I understand very differently today than I did twenty years ago.
I think that, too, is part of being a student.
For many years I travelled regularly to Mysore, India, to study Ashtanga Yoga with Sharath Jois, who authorised me to teach in 2016. He was my teacher until until his passing in November 2024 and I still learn a lot from him. Later in October 2016, I opened Mysore Vienna.
Those facts belong here.
But they don’t tell you very much about how I teach.
Twenty-five years of practise have not made me certain.
Quite the opposite.
The longer I practise, the less interested I become in having all the answers.
I have learned from wonderful teachers.
I have also learned from teachers whose choices showed me very clearly what kind of teacher I did not want to become.
I have learned from injuries and getting older.
From my own ambition.
From doing too much.
From being stopped.
From starting again.
And, perhaps most of all, from the people who have trusted me enough to practise with me – and from those who decided to move on.
Teaching has made me look again and again at what I thought I knew.
A body is not a theory.
A person is not a sequence.
And a student is not a project.
I don’t need you to become impressive.
I don’t need your practice to look like mine.
And I don’t need you to believe everything I believe.
What matters to me is that we can work honestly together.
That I pay attention.
That you learn to pay attention.
That there is enough trust to try something, enough freedom to question something, and enough humility on both sides to change course when necessary.
I still practise, learn and I still get things wrong.
And I hope I never reach the point where being called a teacher makes me forget any of that.