Yoga has been part of my life since 2000. I started practising when I was pregnant with my son.
That´s really how simple it began.
India had already entered my life a year earlier, in 1999.
In 2007 I went there for the first time with only one purpose: to learn Ashtanga Yoga. My first teachers were Rolf Naujokat and his wife Marci.
One year became another.
I simply kept practising.
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. He authorised me to teach in 2016.
He was my teacher until his passing in November 2024.
And I still learn a lot from him.
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 practice have not made me certain.
Quite the opposite.
The longer I practise, the less interested I become in having all the answers.
Yoga also eventually led me into four years of study Buddhist psychology and meditation.
And the longer I practice, reflect, and study, the less interest I become in pretending that I have arrived somewhere.
I am still a student and hope that never changes.