y name is Marije E. Paternotte. I would like to share with you how I found my way to the path of a yogini, hoping that it will inspire you to find yours.

For ten years, I worked as a lawyer serving big corporations and wealthy individuals, both in The Netherlands and in Curaçao. Though I enjoyed the challenges and rewards of the work, I also felt the accompanying stress. It was during this time that I discoved the benefits of yoga and a window to a new way of life was opened. A way that would bring me joy and peace of mind.

With 7 years of yoga experience, I am a certified Kripalu Yoga Teacher, trained at the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health in Massachusetts and am registered with Yoga Alliance (RYT200). Additionaly, I am certified by the Nosara Yoga Institute in Costa Rica to teach Let Your Yoga Dance ® and have completed a YogaEd. program for teaching yoga to children.

Furthermore, I studied for two years at School of Life in Amsterdam; an integral training for consciousness, healing and reading. Through this program, I learned healing and reading skills, as well as conscious communication.

I wish to share the benefits of yoga with other people. I sincerely believe that if everybody on this planet practiced yoga, the world would be at peace. I want to make a contribution to make that happen.

My Story

Physical exercise has always played an important part in my life. I practiced ballet for ten years, three of which were training to become a professional ballet dancer. Later, I looked for another way to train hard, so I joined the University Rowing Club. I was selected as a member of the University Rowing Team and trained 7 days a week. At that time, the physical training was more important to me than personal growth. Let alone spiritual engagement.

I first started practicing yoga in 2002, in order to recover from work related stress. The classes I took just helped me to relax and I didn’t think of it as anything more than that. Two years later, I started to practice a little on my own. At that time, I was living on a Caribbean island where it wasn’t hard to get up at sunrise to do my asanas outside on the deck. I noticed that my practice quieted my mind, which felt to be a good start to the day and it helped me to be better focused at work.

In 2006, my yoga practice started intensifying: I studied both Bikram and traditional Hatha yoga. It wasn’t difficult for me to just copy the postures I saw other people doing in the yoga class. At first, the Bikram yoga class was no more than an ordinary workout to me. I wasn’t aware yet what it did to my body and mind. However, at times, especially during the Hatha yoga class, I would get very frustrated and irritated when I was not able to do a posture the way I thought it should be done. Little did I know. When I confessed this to my Hatha yoga teacher, he told me to be patient and to never show how I felt during practice. “Just keep your face relaxed”, he said. Since I am a perfectionist and want to do everything right, I just decided to keep my face relaxed during class. Amazingly, this had a very positive effect on my practice. It seemed that the postures became easier, just by keeping my face relaxed. Also, I learned to consciously breathe into the parts of my body that would feel stiff or in any other way not cooperative - going into the resistance and then releasing it. Gradually, I began to understand that the resistance in my body was just a reflection of the resistance, or inflexibility, in my mind and the way I looked at life. Instead of denying this resistance, by facing it and going into it, I was able to release it and transform it.

In September 2007, I became a student at School of Life, an integral training for personal growth, consciousness, healing and reading. This program offers it’s students tools to become a spiritual therapist with reading and healing skills. A large part of the first year’s curriculum entails becoming aware of, and dealing with, one’s childhood issues and so called defence mechanisms, assisted by sessions with a professional therapist. These sessions, combined with some painful events in my personal life, put my whole life upside down. I experienced some very difficult months, during which I touched the bottom of a deep black pit, so to speak. In the meantime, my body seemed to exert its own wisdom and made me go to my yoga classes even more often. The yoga practice helped me to stay grounded and “stay in my body”. Also, I became aware that the deep and slow breathing I practiced in class made me more relaxed outside class. In addition, I found that the balancing postures brought balance to my thoughts, helping me to get a grip on the chaos in my mind.

Early in the summer of 2008, it felt like I was done processing the issues I’d had to deal with. I decided to go to Bali, Indonesia, to attend a yoga retreat. During this six days yoga retreat, I attended yoga classes two times a day. It was then, that I truly experienced what yoga did for my body. After two days, my body felt more “open” than it had ever done before. Suddenly, I could do some postures I had never been able to do. Moreover, I felt a direct relation between my emotions and all the practice I did. One afternoon, a last wave of sadness came out. It was clear to me that this appearance of hidden emotion was just caused by all the stretching during practice. A good example of how the mind-body connection works! The peace I felt in my body afterwards was unbelievable. My mind could go on having all kinds of thoughts, but my body was just silent and feeling soft from the inside out.

Since that yoga retreat on Bali, I practice yoga everyday. It has become as natural as brushing my teeth. It feels like something is missing when I don’t. I have never felt so happy and at peace in my life. The real me has emerged. According to my friends, I look radiant, healthy and relaxed. I feel stable and balanced and more in tune with everything around me.

A friend, who is also a yoga teacher, once told me: “You don’t have to go look for the right yoga teacher training, the right one will come to you”. And so it happened. When I was on Bali, I read about the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health (Massachusetts, USA) in a Yoga Magazine. Something inside me stirred. At home, I checked the Kripalu website. It resonated deeply. I just knew: “This is where I have to go”.

Then, in Richard Faulds’ book on Kripalu Yoga, I was amazed to discover that the way I think about yoga practice and “living yoga” is in tune with everything I read in this book. During that earlier time when I was feeling so miserable, as I described above, I had begun learning how to be compassionate with myself. This has had such a positive effect on my feelings that it has become my favourite subject to talk about with other people; to be compassionate with themselves and others. I believe it is not a coincidence that the yoga I felt drawn to is all about compassion. Kripalu literally means “compassion”.

With the emergence of the real me, my life has changed dramatically. I was working as a lawyer when I began practicing yoga every day. Though I was no longer happy with the work I was doing, I thought I could deal with it. My body thought differently and I became very ill. I knew this to be a signal to make me aware of the fact that I was forcing myself into something that wasn’t serving me well. It took me several months to recover and to mentally prepare for a big decision. Eventually, I said goodbye to my life as a lawyer.

Now, I am exploring the path of a yogini.