25 years, one life-changing injury, and a method built on listening

I was born and raised in Austria, and an internationally mobile life gave me an early appreciation for adapting to different people and places. Fitness, psychology and well-being were always my real passion even though I worked full-time as an executive secretary: I started out teaching aerobics in Austria in the early 1980s after a year as an exchange student in the USA. In 1985 I moved to Manila/Philippines to work for the Austrian Trade Commission. Five years later, I moved to Greece, where I would live for 26 years, raised a family and worked as PA to the German Chairman of a company dealing in global shopping centre development. In the early years in Greece, I simply taught a weekly fitness class for friends.

Everything changed in 1997, when an American friend gave me a Power Yoga video by Bryan Kest. I was instantly hooked, and by 1999 I was teaching yoga myself — purely as a hobby at first, drawn most to the energetic, powerful styles of Ashtanga and Vinyasa Flow yoga. Over the following years I learned allot from books and trained at workshops in Athens with internationally renowned teachers from the USA including Bryan Kest, Shiva Rea and Seane Corn.

In November 2009, during a very stressful work period, an aggressive fitness regimen combined with tension and stress left me with three slipped discs in my neck. The nerve pain was horrific and I narrowly avoided surgery. It took months to recover fully and years to lose my fear of re-injury — but that experience changed everything. I knew I had to be kinder to my body. My only way to release tension were fast and furious HIIT workouts and sweaty power yoga. I was very fit but my body was constantly aching and I suffered debilitating migraines and had many food sensitivities.

That turning point eventually led me to formal training: a Yin & Yang teacher training with Simon Low (British Yoga Academy) in Koh Samui, Thailand, in January 2012, whose combination of yogic wisdom with applied anatomy felt like exactly the right foundation. In 2015, I trained further in Toronto with Susi Hately (we had to read her book “How to avoid yoga injuries” in preparation for the YIN & Yang teacher training), one of the world's leading yoga therapists, and have continued studying with her and other leaders in the movement world (ie. the movement scientist and bio-mechanist Katy Bowman as well as Jill Miller, Founder & Creator of Yoga Tune-Up therapy balls) ever since. I have also done courses in Kinetix fascia release, nervous system regulation and movement for older adults.

I moved to the Algarve, Portugal, in September 2016, and in 2018 after dabbling with little success in real estate, I made the decision to finally make my true passion my living. Since then I have taught countless therapeutic group classes and have helped people from all walks of life move out of injury and chronic pain — including clients recovering from surgery, cancer treatment, and conditions like fibromyalgia and other autoimmune disorders.