My Personal Yoga Journey

I started practicing yoga in August 2014 and still remember that first super-short practice like it was yesterday.

It was during a time in my life which was quite dark, highly stressful and frustrating for me and with me having had constant pain in my right arm and shoulder for at least half a year. I desperately had already tried a lot of remedies then: warmth, salves, physiotherapy, ... but nothing could alleviate the discomfort and each inhale sent aching stabs of pain through my arm and shoulder.

One night, I was sitting at home knowing I needed something to relieve some build-up stress and tension. I went on YouTube and searched for "yoga", thinking I might give it a try (I used to be fascinated by yoga in my very early teenage years but never really got around to actually practice it and during my adolescence and twenties simply forgot about it or thought it was stupid…).

That Summer’s night in 2014, I found Adriene Mishler's YouTube channel "Yoga with Adriene" and watched a beginner's practice thinking I could be actually able to do this and follow along. I tried a short five minutes practice right away and it instantly made me feel better. The next weeks and months I practiced online maybe once or twice a week guided by Adriene, learning the basic foundations and alignments of the most common yoga asanas through her amazing tutorial videos and beginner practices.

And already very shortly after starting practicing yoga like this, my shoulder pain was - to my amazement - simply gone!

Thus, in the beginning I stuck to my yoga practice mainly for the cure of pain and the physical and stress-relieving benefits of it but nevertheless got hooked.

In January 2015, Adriene's 30 Days of Yoga Challenge went online on YouTube and I practiced happily along. In the beginning, not believing I'd be able to really make it to the mat on a daily basis. But somehow I managed to and it (and I in consequence) felt amazing. After that month of daily practice, I kept a regular schedule, practicing about two times per week.

Not long after that, my practice started to intensify further, I checked out other YouTube yoga channels (Doyogawithme, YogaTX, and Ekhart Yoga became amongst others my favourites with teachers like Fiji McAlpine, Christa Shillington, David Procyshyn, Jen Hilman, Cole Chance, Savannah Victoria) as well as other yoga types (hatha, vinyasa, power and yin yoga) and I established an almost daily yoga practice with the help of these teachers.

However, in 2016 I was also starting to really miss a "real" yoga class in my life and experiencing community together with real people and not just having my solo home practice following along a virtual youtube class. I went to yoga classes at the gym close by my home and also to some yoga studios around my place but didn't really find what I was looking for.

It wasn't until summer of 2017 when I stepped into Nicole Dechow’s newly opened Soul & Yoga Studio in Hamburg that I finally found the place which felt good and simply right for me to become the home of my "real world" yoga!

As well sometime around summer 2017, a spark inside me ignited that I would like to dive much deeper into all aspects of yoga and do a yoga teacher training.

By this time, I felt my practice no longer being "only" about the physical aspects of yoga but its teachings had slowly and steadily seeped into my mind, heart and soul and made me feel so much better about myself, others, and everything surrounding me.

Having come from this deep feeling of disintegration from everything and most people around me, having been in a state of slowly but continuously downward-spiraling and being full of negative self-talk and a sense of hopelessness and with any spiritual connection having been for long subdued, yoga practice opened up a completely new route and way out of this state of being for me. It helped me find my way out of this darkness and into the light again. Finally reuniting my body, mind and soul, filling me with energy, letting me find again trust in myself and my intuition, and finally letting me breathe freely again.

In consequence, I am beyond grateful for having found yoga (or for yoga having found me?) and about that night when I stumbled across that first YouTube online yoga practice.

Simultaneously to wanting to dive deeper into yoga, I also started to feel the slowly growing wish to share all its wonderful benefits and gifts - physically, mentally, and spiritually - that I have experienced and that have truly changed myself, my perception and thinking and my life in such a positive way, with others who might also be in need of that.

That’s why I embarked on doing a 200 hour yoga teacher training at Soul & Yoga in 2018 – half of it on the weekends in Hamburg, the other half in beautiful Ashwem, Goa, in magical India, the birthplace of yoga. The whole teacher training was a truly transformative experience for me with so many new learnings and many, many precious memories. 

Nowadays, I would say, my practice feels no longer limited to the mat but yoga has started to extend into my everyday life and thinking and its philosophy and history fascinates me tremendously.

I try to make some time for my personal yoga practice and be a student myself everyday. Even if that sometimes means only ten minutes on the mat since I see and feel the good that it brings to me and my life immediately.

In the past years, what started as a merely physical yoga asana practice, has started to shift much more into a complete sadhana practice.

Focusing more deeply also on meditation, breathwork and other yoga styles like kundalini yoga and bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion. I love, enjoy and crave diving ever deeper into the teachings of yoga, exploring the myths and the wisdom behind this ancient science, learning about its sister science ayurveda and the chakras and using mantra – tools for the mind – and chanting to open the heart and increase focus and concentration during meditation. ♡