Balthasar

Yoga has done me good every time I’ve tried it. But for a long time, self-expression was more important to me than self-care, which is what I consider yoga to be today. I didn’t start practicing regularly until I was about 35, when I started attending weekly Iyengar yoga classes at Unisport in Basel. At the end of November 2012, when I broke away from an important but unhappy love relationship, I was looking for support and meaning to get through the difficult time and dragged myself to Bikram Yoga. I found the first hour pretty awful, but the soothing relaxation that followed the exhausting 90 minutes was exactly what I needed. During the savasana at the end, I was visited by conciliatory and mystical images of the path ahead, which I had to embark on alone – without a partner.

For the next two years, I visited the studio often and regularly and did several 30-day challenges until I signed up for teacher training in Thailand in 2014. After my return to Basel, I taught more classes every month until I was allowed to take over the management of the Basel studio in May 2015 and thus also got to know all the other areas that it takes to run a studio. In addition to Basel, I also taught in Bern, Lucerne, Stuttgart, Hamburg and now, since June 2024, also in Zurich, which makes me particularly happy.

One important experience was a period of chronic pain between 2020 and 2023, when I sometimes thought I would never be able to move normally again. The inner process that was triggered by this difficult time and the resulting different attitude towards life touches me more than anything else.