How did you first get into yoga?
Yoga happened to me in my mid-twenties. At that time, I was looking for my spiritual identity and change. I came across a yoga teacher training (Swasthya Yoga) based in Florianopolis and enrolled in 2008. Months after, armed with the courage of youth, I was giving yoga classes at a community centre in Itajai, on the south coast of Brazil. In that same year, I decided to move to the UK, but my English was non-existent, so I taught private lessons to any Portuguese-speaking person I could find. From the beginning, I found in yoga all that I was searching for.
What inspired you in those early days?
I grew up lacking a father figure, and found in yoga a metaphor for self-discipline or tough love; that is how I interpret my preference for physically challenging practices. In other words, what originally inspired me in my early days was that yoga represented masculine energy in my life, a promise that if I kept going, I was
