Over the past few years, I've had to go back to basics more times than I would have liked.
First, there was a knee injury after running five days a week during COVID. Then pregnancy, which meant rebuilding my core strength and gradually finding my way back into movement. And most recently, a fractured elbow and a concussion from a fall during bouldering, which once again forced me to reconsider what my body was capable of.
Before these physical setbacks, there was my burnout, probably the biggest turning point in my life. Looking back, I recognize a pattern: my most meaningful periods of transformation began when I could no longer continue doing things the way I always had. And every time, the one thing that scared me most: “What if something happens and I can't keep up this way any longer?”, turned out to be the unexpected gift I needed, to get myself out of a plateau and into a new system and lifestyle.
Before the broken elbow, I remember often thinking: I NEED to exercise and be fit, otherwise I just don't feel like myself. But recovering from the broken elbow, I literally had to start with one-kilogram weights. None of my usual sports routines were available to me anymore. I needed to add boring drills to my day. Simple leg exercises, core work, carefully hanging on things, and doing push-ups against walls. And something surprising happened: I loved it. For several reasons.
Those very things I used to find tedious, boring, and distracting from the fun stuff, I enjoyed doing. Because I had a purpose. There was something incredibly peaceful about stripping everything back to the fundamentals. Rather than always chasing the next inversion, getting my one-arm handstand off the wall, and always focusing on what I couldn't do, I became curious about what I could do, what I'd been compensating for, and what I might discover if I approached movement as a beginner again.
My physiotherapist has been amazed by how quickly my arm has recovered and what I'm already able to do with it after 12 weeks (I am back to arm balancing and bouldering). But surprisingly so, my hang time in some arm balances has improved rather than deteriorated, even though I hadn't practised them in three months. And this has reinforced something I've experienced repeatedly: going back to basics can be an opportunity to grow, and as a side dish: discover things you didn't even know you were missing.
And this time, it wasn't just my body that needed rebuilding.
The Unexpected Freedom of Not Teaching Yoga
My injury meant I had to stop teaching yoga classes for a while, and (!spoiler alert!) I decided to make that final.
Now, I absolutely love teaching yoga. There are few things that bring together my interests, knowledge, and skills as beautifully as guiding people through movement, breathwork, meditation, and reflection. Teaching puts me in a state of flow. I just feel authentically myself when doing it, and therefore I enjoyed every moment of teaching over the past seven years.
So I didn't expect what happened next. I stopped teaching and then…
First, an immense load came off my shoulders. More time at home with my daughter. No more pressure on my partner to fix my schedule. I wasn't rushing through my working day because I had to be somewhere at six, thinking about my class while doing other things, or organizing a substitute when I couldn't teach. I could go dancing. Meet friends. Have dinner with my family.
And I realized that one hour of teaching had often occupied something like five hours of mental space. I knew that, rationally. But it's a different experience when you FEEL it.
What surprised me most was how much peace I felt. Not because I no longer wanted to teach, but because I had stopped organizing my life around a particular idea of what being a yoga teacher was supposed to look like.
For years, I'd assumed that if I called myself a yoga teacher, I should be teaching regular classes in a studio. Otherwise, what would I say when someone asked, “Oh, where do you teach?” It's funny how much influence such a simple question can have over the choices we make.
I had become attached to the image of being a yoga teacher, without really questioning whether the way I was doing it still made sense for me.
There's a line from one of the former colleagues/friends of The Dark Wizard, in the documentary about climber and BASE jumper Dean Potter, that has stayed with me:
“Your ego is not your amigo.”
I love that line, because ego isn't only about thinking you're better than other people. Sometimes it's about becoming so attached to a particular image of yourself that you stop questioning whether it still serves you.
And perhaps, without realizing it, that attachment had started getting in the way of actually living the principles I was teaching: Listening to your body. Respecting your limits. Making space for what matters. Finding balance. Speaking my truth. Being authentic and honest, and speaking up about things that aren't the way they are supposed to be. This is what yoga is about.
And there was another side to this realization. The economics of teaching regular studio classes had been bothering me for a looooooong time. I had been trying to combine teaching with building my coaching business, creating online content, and raising a family. But the more I tried to make everything work, the more I realized how difficult it was to maintain a reasonable income and a reasonable working week while teaching yoga.
For your reading comfort, I decided to explore that question in more detail in a separate blog/article, Why Is a Yoga Class Worth the Same as an Iced Matcha Latte? Which I will publish next month (keep an eye on it cause it's going to be spicy haha). But the short version is that I had been trying to make a system work that, for me, was increasingly incompatible with the very thing I teach: emotional, physical, and mental balance.
How could I encourage others to listen to their bodies, respect their limits, and find balance while continuing to work in a way that made those things increasingly difficult for me?
And perhaps the most interesting question wasn't whether I could make it work, but why I felt I needed to.
Since I stopped teaching in studios, I actually practise more yoga than I did when I was teaching regular studio classes. And since I'm no longer teaching evenings, I now have so much more social space. I see my family and friends more. There's something wonderfully freeing about allowing yourself to question an identity you've held onto for years. And I really think this is true in any area of life.
Rebuilding Something Different
All of this has also made me reconsider how I want to work. I don't want to stop teaching. And I don't want to move everything online, either. I need a hybrid situation because true connection is at the heart of what I do.
In many yoga classes, we arrive, practise, perhaps exchange two minutes of conversation, and then return to our separate lives. I think there's so much untapped potential for connection there. I also repeatedly had former students reaching out to me asking where and when I would be teaching again. So I felt there was an opportunity to experiment with a different model.
In November, I am organizing the Whole Body Mini Retreat. It brings together yoga, breathwork, Internal Family Systems, reflection, food, and community in one day. Rather than simply moving through a yoga sequence, we go back to basics: explore the foundations of movement and awareness before adding complexity, we connect intellectual understanding with physical and emotional experience, and create space to integrate those insights into everyday life.
At the heart of it is a deceptively simple question: what really matters to you? How do you want to spend your time, your energy, and your money? At a fundamental level, how do you want to move your body, how do you want to make space for your emotions, how do you challenge your mental models? I want to create space for people to explore those questions not just briefly, but deeply. Think them through, feel them trough, discuss them with others, and leave the room feeling a meaningful shift.
Dare to Go Back to Basics
Looking back, what surprises me most about the past few months isn't how much I've lost through injury, but how much I've enjoyed returning to the fundamentals, and how necessary that was to rearrange my life according to my values.
As Brené Brown puts it, “Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen.”
And I think that's part of what I'm trying to practise here. I am not sure yet that I've found the right answer, but I do want to share my ideas, ask relevant questions, make different choices, and see what happens.
Stopping teaching, writing openly about my experiences in the yoga industry, and doing this retreat for the first time is fucking scary. What if it fails? What if people read my blog about my issues with the yoga economy next month and think pfffffffffffffft, what an entitled hippie person? What if no one shows up for the retreat? This is ME. Making a stance. Quitting something I have known for years without knowing of the new thing will work. Jumping into the unknown. Letting myself be seen.
Teaching at a studio was a lot safer. Now I have to be a beginner all over. And people are going to watch me do it. Yajks…
But at the same time, doing the scary thing feels INCREDIBLY liberating. Because whether I fail or not, and whether people agree with me or not, it feels so much more authentic.
I've come to see difficult periods, whether it's burnout, injury, or another unexpected setback, as invitations to return to the fundamentals. Not because these experiences are inherently good, or because we should feel obliged to find something positive in them (please don't feel like all suffering SHOULD be great, because no one but you should be the judge of that), but because I've learned that approaching them with curiosity and the courage to close safe doors and open new ones can open up possibilities I hadn't considered before.
Going back to basics is an opportunity to reconsider what really matters to you, to question the assumptions you've been living by, and to allow yourself to discover something new.
So if you wish to take something with your from this story:
What is something you've been taking for granted or accepted as ‘normal’ that might be worth rethinking?
An assumption about your work? Your body? Your relationships? The value of your time? The person you think you're supposed to be (with)?
Let me know your thoughts!
with love,
Inge