I began practicing yoga in the early 2000’s. I had worked at a local fitness club expanding into a whole health and wellness service, where I planned, wrote and edited their membership magazine. As part of my payment, I got to practice for free. I started with lifting weights and then moved on to something called Body Balance. It was soft motions, yet strengthening, and it became the precursor to later take classes in Poweryoga. Poweryoga is based on Ashtanga yoga, although not as physically challenging and for one hour. I practiced there for a couple of years and later for another teacher too. 

Yoga to me, became a way to align the motions with a type of breath, that enabled me to endure more. Often, we practiced with lower lights and lit candles to really be able to relax and turn inwardly. In Savasana, the last motion laying down in our practice, I began experiencing stillness. A pause between my thoughts as I paused my breath. And in this stillness, I felt I gained access to the spiritual realm. 

When I went to Hawaii in 2004 and 2005, I bought a mat there and practiced at sunset by the beach, or on my own, inside my little studio, when I wasn’t studying Organizational Change. 

Back in Sweden, I focused more on my dancing but have kept practicing yoga at home, once a week or so, ever since! That is practicing yoga for more than 20 years! Besides, at the beach park in Hawaii, I’ve even practiced inside a prison cell when I at another stint back in Hawaii, was later detained by ICE, directly on the floor. And I’ve practiced in hostel rooms in Portugal. 

In 2008, I was approached online by a man from Kerala in India, who wanted to teach me to chant the Gayatri Mantra, I gladly accepted and soon found a melody I could use for it. It became a way of praying for six years. Then I realized, it wasn’t right for me to do, as I had decided to become a devout Christian. At the end of my practices, I had begun feeling threatened and nauseous, just like with the type of Qigong I used to do, so I stopped the Indian chanting and nowadays only do Hawaiian for Hula, and on occasion I chant a Buddhist kind.

Does practicing yoga really mean that we have to become spiritual and study with a guru? A part of me really felt weird about that, to call someone a Master or Guru as if to worship them. That is not what I’m about. I was given Deeksha and Shaktipat and was introduced to the Oneness University by people in Sweden, who were associated with them, but felt a lingering darkness with it. I have read some of the Vedic books, but I prefer to keep to the Bible. If I would mention any Yogi guru that I like, it would only be Krishnamurti. He was born in 1895 and died in 1986 after spreading his writings in California. And he has advised to not follow any discipline, teacher, authority or guru, even himself, but instead focusing on living righteously in meditation and in full presence, always open for dialogue.

To me, yoga became a tool to get to know my body better. Since we most of the time, were doing the same motions, or asanas, it became a way to notice whether it felt different or harder some days and easier others, and why that could be. With time, I felt like I had gotten access to a better control of my body from within, a more open and flexible body that allows my organs to function better, which in turn has made me a better dancer, a little more centered. And I had just improved and was able to begin standing on my wrists for the Peacock pose, or Mayurasana, when I was abruptly forced into a psychiatric ward by a yoga teacher I’ve never talked to or met in Sweden, but reported for plagiarism, instead of investigating that. So much for humility! I think there is a great risk of cult like powerplays with yoga practitioners trying to compensate letting go of their egos, with a spiritually founded ego instead. All becoming a false narrative of being better than, as a person, when in fact it’s been a refusal to communicate and solve our indifferences. How immature and evil! Not very enlightened and yogic. Unfortunately, I gained lots of weight unexpectedly, together with some other physical health challenges, rewinding my abilities to almost like on a beginner’s level. The good news, I still practice yoga at home of course. 

I strive to only follow yoga teachers on social media who are from India. When I was in Germany 2018, I shared hostel room with a girl from India, who invited me to visit Rishikesh if I wanted to learn more yoga. And in Portugal in 2020, I met a couple of Indian guys and asked them about their yoga. They shared that it’s a type of morning gymnastics in schools nowadays and they can’t understand the Western hype at all. It solidifies the importance to uphold indigenous traditions with integrity, which is what Telluselle Living Center is all about. To strike a pose, but with a local, in a local style.

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