The beginning of a practice

I attended my first yoga class in 2022 with my best friend. It was in a small room inside one of those very Parisian buildings in the 3rd arrondissement. Five people in the class. The teacher guided us through an om at the end and I remember thinking it was a strange thing to do.

I wasn't bad at it, though. Growing up in the south of France, every Wednesday was reserved for extracurricular activities, and I cycled through different martial arts for years. Nothing too serious. The kind of sports you do as a kid and quietly drop when life fills up. But something from that stayed, some baseline of comfort in the body that made the class feel familiar enough. I left feeling good, which was enough to stay curious.

Modo

Later that year, I started a new job that came with sports benefits. In August 2023, I tried my first class at Modo Yoga in Paris. It's a heated studio, which I had not looked into beforehand. I learned quickly to show up in something light.

What kept me going back was the sweat. It sounds simple but sweating that much felt cleansing in a way that was hard to explain at the time.

I was working from home, coding most of the day, with a routine that barely changed. Wake up, shower, coffee, walk the dog, stop at the boulangerie, come home, open the laptop, start reviewing pull requests, and then, several hours later, find myself holding my head in my hands wondering why such a still day could feel so exhausting. Yoga became the interruption that routine needed.

I kept the practice for two years, which made me curious to try other styles.

What it became

What I've come to understand is that it started as something physical and quietly turned into something else.

A lot of teachers came and went. I've been to a few hundred classes by now, in different cities across Europe, the US, and Asia, and each one added something, a cue, a sequence, a way of holding a room. The physical practice was always there, but at some point it also became a way to pay attention to what was happening internally rather than just pushing through it.

I started to understand what kind of student I was, and from that, slowly, what kind of teacher I might want to be.