For about a year I combined my legal career with teaching yoga. The contrast was striking. After a full day at the office followed by teaching a two-hour evening yoga class, I would often feel energised and inspired. Yet on evenings when I managed to leave work early and go straight home, I would arrive exhausted, with no energy for anything else.

Leaving law to teach yoga was a leap into the unknown. At the time, choosing yoga as a profession was far less common than it is today. But my body was already showing me something I would understand much more deeply later: vitality has a lot to do with whether we are living in a way that is true to our nature.

My body became one of my first and most demanding teachers. About a year after I’d left my job as a lawyer, my back problems became severe enough to stop me in my tracks. What followed was not only a search for my own recovery, but the beginning of my path into yoga therapy.

I have worked through significant lumbar hernias and other spinal problems, reproductive health challenges including amenorrhea and endometriosis, as well as severe anxiety and sleep disorders. Working with my own body, studying it and developing practices that helped me recover profoundly shaped the way I work today.

It also led me deeper into physiotherapy, anatomy and physiology. I became fascinated by how the body works and how the principles of yoga can be understood through the physiology of movement, breathing and the nervous system. I was also involved in the Russian translation of Anatomy of Hatha Yoga by Dr. David Coulter, which became part of this ongoing exploration.

Yet for me yoga has never been only about asanas or their sequences, even though they are a very important part of yoga.

To me yoga is about connection: between body and mind, between different parts of ourselves, between ourselves and other people, and ultimately between ourselves and life.

This is why I see yoga as both a science and an art of wholeness.

Wholeness does not mean always feeling good. It is the capacity to remain in contact with the different, sometimes opposite, parts of our experience: joy and grief, strength and vulnerability, fear and curiosity, tension and relaxation without having to reject one in order to keep another.

This understanding of yoga is why my work has naturally grown beyond asana. Yoga therapy, physiology, psychology, ayurveda, feminine practices and voice yoga may look like different disciplines, but for me they are different ways of exploring the same question: How do we remain in contact with ourselves, with others and with life? How do we live and thrive rather than just survive and cope?

Voice yoga holds a very special place in my work. Just as physical yoga practice can teach us to tolerate physical opposites — expansion and contraction, heat and cold — voice yoga allows us to explore our capacity to stay present with emotional opposites. Joy and grief. Anger and tenderness. Fear and desire. Strength and vulnerability.

It is about unblocking our capacity to remain authentic and connected while allowing ourselves to be heard and seen.

Over the years, my studies have continued to expand alongside my practice. My professional background includes physical rehabilitation and Schroth therapy for scoliosis, yoga therapy, ayurveda, psychology, aromatherapy, sound healing and continuing education in trauma and body-oriented approaches. I continue to study because my work continues to evolve.

There is an ayurvedic term I adore: swastha. It is usually translated as health, but its deeper meaning points towards being established in one’s own nature, being in one’s own place.

For me, this is what yoga ultimately serves. And to be in my place I need to keep up with life itself.

Not escaping life. Not getting rid of vulnerability.

Not becoming an ideal yogi.

But meeting life more deeply, while remaining open, connected to ourselves and able to adapt, respond and grow.