Rishikesh

After a crazy journey, intense month, doing yoga and meditations every single day, meeting amazing new friends, crying and laughing at the same time, feeling sore muscles in my whole body, absorbing a lot of inspiring wisdom, eating the most delicious Indian food and exploring the beautiful surroundings of Rishikesh, it's over, finito, done.

I AM A YOGA TEACHER!!!!!

Wow, it's strange to say it out loud... it still feels a bit surreal. But one thing I know for real, I love yoga and gonna be a yogi for the rest of my life!

I cannot describe how thankful I am. I changed a lot, in my perspective. If you are interested you can read my short evaluations I had to write to pass my exam:

Yoga
Yoga is about finding freedom, through your own path. Your own dharma. So for me yoga is a way of living. A way of living in which finding harmony plays a central role. Finding harmony in the broadest sense of the word. Finding harmony in my body, mind and soul, which are all connected as one. With yoga asanas and a satvic diet I learn to find harmony in my body. The asanas helped me to gain strength in my body, and at the same time become flexible. With meditation I learn to find balance and calmness in the mind. By doing so, I can come closer to my inner soul and find more harmony. 
Yoga has different paths. One of them I like to point out is karma yoga. Karma yoga is about performing selfless actions. Actions which go beyond the ego, hence there is no desire to achieve profits or fruits of the actions. In this part of yoga I made some big steps. While I normally could be quite greedy or selfish, I quickly learned to see the beauty of sharing and perform actions without expecting something back. Something to fill up my own emptiness. Since I learned to trust myself and the law of nature, I know I don't need this fruits of actions. It is all there, out in the space. The art is to be sensitive and feel the prana, the life energy, to charge my own energy.  
Trough this amazing teacher training course and living a yogi life I can connect with the soul of the universe and become one with it, like a drop dissolving in the ocean. Yoga gives me trust, peace and happiness!  

Meditation 
Meditation for me means to be in a space beyond everything. Beyond our body, beyond our senses, beyond our mind. You are in a quiet place with only silence. Although the world is awake and moving, you are asleep and still. All your senses merge together and become one. There are many many different kinds of meditation. Meditations where you focus your concentration on one single object or part of your body and meditations where you have a broad attention. The powerful transformation meditation I've learned at Gyan Yog Breath is one of a special kind. It consists of different phases in which you breathe with different techniques. In between the breathing you sit in silence. I've experienced many different things during this silence. Sometimes my mind couldn't stop. I struggled and wanted to stop my mind talking to me in a negative way. I cried. But through this I learned a lot about myself. I learned to let go of a specific self-image. The world is changing, and so am I. There is no fixed Iris. I used to be quite strict and harsh to myself, but also kept holding on to this view and that I had to deal with this strict Iris. Now I learned to let go of this fixed image of myself and to laugh more about myself.
Later on in the course there came moments I was in deep meditation and felt the energy flowing through my whole body. The world around me started to dissolve. My body became one with the universe. There was no separation between my body and the air around me, as if my skin disappeared. I was dreaming, but at the same time awake. I was turning in circles or felt like I was floating on the waves of the ocean. After I experienced this deep meditation I noticed that I created a desire to attain this state again and again. So my mind started to interrupt again. After a while I started to smile at this desire and embrace it. I'm still not there yet, but this meditation really helps me to let go off all the thoughts about the past and worries about the future. 

Emotional unblocking treatment 
Emotional unblocking treatment (EBT) is about releasing emotional blockages which are stored in our bodies. The underlying idea is that emotions can cause blockages in the muscles. By pressing specific points you release the tension from the muscles. By releasing the physical tension, automatically (if you surrender) the release of the emotions will follow. For me it is like you keep your working memory and your senses busy with the physical uncomfort, so that the painful deeper emotions can come up. Thoughts and memories which were locked behind a big door in our brains are starting to come out. 
At the start of the treatments I felt quite nervous. I experienced pain and was resisting a little bit. After I surrendered and embraced all the tingling and burning sensations in my body, things started to change. The first time this happened I felt like I was in kind of a trance. My mind turned off and all I felt was my body and emotions. So many memories and emotions came up that I couldn't stop crying for about an hour. Slowly, when time passed and I had more treatments I noticed that I was feeling lighter. A relief of my shoulders, literally and figuratively. 
The experience to treat others was also really special. At the beginning I was touched by the release of the emotions of others. The screaming and crying made a big impact on me. As time passed by I was not that much influenced anymore, probably because my own emotional state had changed too, so I could really focus on where to press on the body. It was hard to distinguish between 'good pain' and 'bad pain'. I felt a little insecure because I didn't want to hurt someone by pressing on a bone or tendon. But all in all, I felt really happy and thankful to be able to help the others with releasing their tension and treating them with compassion.Read more