The Journey
I had been spending years distracting myself from my grief in the mesmerising London vibe of the time. But the noise stopped working. The one in my mind turned into stress. Juggling a job that didn’t fulfil me but that I needed financially, and my university studies, which I loved. I finally decided to see my GP to discuss possibilities and I signed up for a mindfulness course on their advice.
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My legs were shaking in my stretchy clothes, highlighting every imperfection of my figure. Great. No hiding in a small mindfulness class where strangers had time to scan me. Maybe I should turn around? Maybe I’ll be fine? Maybe… oh, too late, I’m in already.
The teacher greeted me calmly. Was she really calm, or just pretending, like me?
In no time my expectations were flipped upside down. Instead of sitting still, we were walking barefoot around a tree in the park. Aaaah… this is good!
—Why am I wearing leggings and a stretchy top again?
—Put that thought aside and think of the present moment, stay here…
—Isn’t this the present moment? Am I getting this right? Well…moving on to the next thought…!
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By the end of the course, we did sit still, but my body still wanted to move. So I saw yoga as a better option for me. I hopped from studio to studio looking for the one that would fit me. I kept at it, and I found it at about 5,000 miles away!
It was time to do what I had originally moved to London for: travel! But not just travel. So, landed a job in Vietnam to teach English to children in a language school. Even while following the syllabus and exam requirements I paired up with the best colleagues guiding me into it through progressive, experiential pedagogies.
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The first thing you might notice in Hanoi is the traffic in the street, at least I did and thought I could no longer complain about Naples’s! On my daily walk from home to school, each time I was crossing and there was no one to follow, I would completely entrust my fate to the universe and walk confidently amongst swarming motorbikes. What a thrill!
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Now, confession: in England, kids terrified me. The worst thing that could have happened on a journey back home was having a child staring at you on the bus. I’d glue my gaze on the book, or stare firmly out the window. Cold and distant, yes, but necessary for survival. Was I becoming too British, or just perfecting my stiff-upper-lip survival kit?
So, when one of my first days teaching in Vietnam a five-year-old ran up, hugged me, and say in a her cute voice “Teacher, I love you!” I froze. Petrified, I managed a nervous smile back at her. My brain: smile. My body: petrified. My feet: run! In fact, I bolted straight to the senior teacher at breaktime. Surely, as an English person, he’d understand my panic.
He looked at me calmly and said, “Don’t worry, it’s fine here. As long as you just smile, maybe a light pat on the shoulder, and that’s fine.” Fine? My entire nervous system screamed otherwise. Reset brain, reset body… Am I just another “docile body… subjected and transformed”? (Michael Foucault, highly recommend).
One of the memories that most stays with me are the amazing Vietnamese TAs who eventually became friends. They gave me cards when I left, all individually crafted and decorated, but with a sentence in common that still makes my heart melt: “you really care about the children”.
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Anyway, back to yoga…
The very first thing I did in Vietnam (after three years of hopping between Battersea, Clapham, and Chelsea studios in London, trying to find the one, as if yoga were dating) was hunt down a lovely and peaceful yoga studio. That’s where I met my guru (she didn’t like the word very much). Well, technically I had two gurus, but she was the one who managed to allow me to truly connect… or reconnect: mens sana in corpore sano, live on old good mantras!
Within weeks I was practising six days a week, three hours a day, in different styles. I even treated myself to weekly holistic Japanese massages recommended by my teachers. I was, finally a true yogi! Is there such a thing?
Somewhere in between all that, I was even invited to a workshop for teachers run by a Western physiologist. It opened my eyes to research on mindfulness and yoga for wellbeing and mental health.
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As my Vietnam chapter came to a close, I travelled across Asia, carrying the echoes of the streets, the laughter of children, and the pulse of my practice, and eventually landed back in London, just in time for a Simon Borg-Oliver workshop. The very same one my Hanoi teacher had attended in Australia. What are the odds? What a beautiful full circle!
Soon after, my journey carried me across the ocean to the Americas and the mystical mountains of Colombia, which became home for a while. As a virtual nomad in buzzy Medellín, I worked as an online English tutor. Most days it meant guiding students through the platform’s material, but there too we had to make it engaging so I always slipped in my own creative twist, and engaged in conversations that made the learner feel empowered. The most amigables people in Colombia they say, also reminded me of Neapolitans with their strong sense of family and their warmth. There too I stumbled into a yogi crowd of locals and expats in Medellín, and, once again, I became part of the furniture.
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When the pandemic struck, I found myself yearning for real connection beyond the virtual English classes I had been teaching for a few years already, and I moved to the countryside. Around this time, hoping to escape the digital blur, I somehow ended up on yet another screen, joining an online Yoga Synergy course with Bianca Machliss and Simon Borg-Olivier, alongside FutureLearn courses on humanities and creative pedagogy. Apparently, even my escape routes came with Wi-Fi. Lucky, I was rescued by the dog I thought I was rescuing! I’ll never forget our walks, and my barefoot morning wanderings took me along a path the natives once used to carry salt down into Medellín. Some mornings, probably in tune with that magical Pachamama that surrounded me, I could almost feel that pre-Hispanic energy rising through the ground into my feet: centuries of footsteps seemed to hum under mine, reminding me that wisdom starts by paying attention to the ground you walk on. I remembered the old Andean saying: “we are not walking on nature, we are nature walking itself”. (I think that’s how it goes. Do not Google it, ask the locals!)
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I also signed up for a Yoga & Mindfulness for Kids teacher training with four local teachers. Two in particular shaped me: a child psychologist, flower essence therapist, and general bringer of play and calm; and a political scientist-turned-clown (yes, really) whose mindfulness practice rooted in the Plum Village tradition of Vietnamese Thich Nhat Hanh (what are the odds!), whose mindfulness practice and theatrical soul taught me how to connect with my crowd in the most unexpected ways.
After all my travels, I found myself returning to my creative and humanist background, and to my Vietnamese yogi foundations, a meeting of Eastern philosophy, Western humanism, and Latin American spirit, but with more of me in it too.
Here, my practice began to evolve into something I wanted to share, not as a performance, but as an exploration.
Sensorial mindful practice with freestyle yoga shapes craft. (Colombia, 2024).
Falling for the mountains, I moved to a village and started a project facilitating English through art, yoga, and mindfulness to children. Unlike the usual foreigner who hides away, I went right into the centre (well, at the foot of a hill).
I became part of the community. Or at least, my dog did, everyone knew her name. Kids practised English commands with her on walks. I didn’t do too bad either! Parents stopped me in the street to chat, and children even tried small talk in English.
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I was no longer just teaching or adapting someone else’s syllabus, I began creating projects, facilitating workshops, and co-designing with other teachers and parents. It felt less like teaching, more like opening a space where we could all learn from one another. I designed the sessions as co-learning, child-led experiments. Probably not the wisest pilot with rowdy, expressive kids used to traditional classrooms. But we made it. Lessons became play, yoga mats became stages, English words became drawings. It wasn’t about hitting outcomes; it was about growing, sharing, imagining, and finding both joy in the chaos and pockets of calm.
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Then Christmas arrived. This time of the year when we all think of family gatherings. For me it was a morning mountain walk with my dog like, just like any other day! Then, one of the smallest things in life that stay with you that change if ever so slightly your senses and feeling was waiting for me unexpectedly. On our way back from the mountain, a neighbour’s child stopped me, dug into his paper bag, and handed me a buñuelo: “este es para ti. Feliz Navidad.” The dog wagged. I melted. Received it joyfully, like a child receiving their Christmas wish. Community, it turns out, sometimes tastes like fried cheese dough.
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Professionally, this was my pivot. I was never just a teacher, but here I stepped into my role as a shaper of learning spaces, weaving together second language acquisition, creativity, play, yoga, and mindfulness. Personally, it was a reminder that transformation doesn’t happen solely in silence or solitude, but also in the noisy, messy, beautiful chorus of community. Those children turned out to be some of the greatest teachers I’ve ever had.
Connecting with the environment, connecting with self, growing community (Colombia, 2022).
When I left the Colombian pueblo, people told me other foreigners had tried facilitating children there but never lasted more than a few weeks. I stayed nearly two years, slipping in and out of the country but always coming back, mostly because of the kids (and my dog, who was basically a local celebrity).
The truth? My Spanish helped, but what really mattered was the openness, the chaos, the shared learning. We laughed, we improvised, we failed spectacularly sometimes, and still kept showing up, each one of us. That’s what made it work.
It was one of the most meaningful teaching experiences I’ve had. Not just because I taught, but because I was allowed to be myself, to create, to direct, to follow, and the kids were too. We learned from each other. We created something together.
This wasn’t just holding space and learning. It was belonging.
After spending a long time in the Andes, I kept chasing that reconnection through the summer, riding my ‘boot’ from the Alps to the Apennines, and down to the Pillars of Hercules with my friends and family. I finally landed back in England. This time, in Manchester. I thought a smaller city might be calmer. Turns out it was just colder, wetter, and a little greyer, but also much friendlier and community minded. London really is its own country!
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Manchester’s arts and community scene became a local anchor. I visited and attended workshops across the city, including at the Whitworth Gallery, where I also volunteered to exchange ideas, be inspired by other artists, and build new connections, and, indeed, to support creative projects similar to the one I had created in Colombia; all of which reminded me that creativity flourishes as much in rainy galleries as in sunny mountain villages.
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Meanwhile, I taught a 10-week yoga programme in a local school, a valuable opportunity to adapt my creative, inclusive approach to a more structured educational setting. Officially, it was about outcomes and targets; unofficially, I wanted to see how much freedom and mindful connection could still fit inside that frame. The children responded with curiosity and honesty, reminding me that even within structure, movement and awareness can spark real change. What struck me was how in the end that same spark, the same joy appears in children everywhere, just wearing different clothes, speaking different languages, shaped by different backgrounds.
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I also began leaning into more restorative practices, such as Reiki, perhaps a nostalgic nod to my Asian chapters, or maybe just an excuse to slow down and stay connected through mindful touch and presence. Either way, I blended it into my growing toolkit, weaving it together with the pulse of Colombian drums, the rain-like whisper of the palo de lluvia, and other sensorial inspirations carried from the ancient heritage of cultures I had mingled with.
I then kept deepening my yoga training, adding trauma-informed approaches to my toolkit. It wasn’t the certificates that mattered. The real learning came from sharing with others, people from wildly different professional, cultural, and personal backgrounds, which finally allowed me to shift how I could hold space.
In the end, it wasn’t just about streets or galleries, hills or classrooms; it was about shared spaces, human sparks, messy creativity, self-discovery, and the simple delight of learning together.
Throughout this journey, my teachers have come in many forms: books, places, remarkable individuals, teachers and professors, whole communities, and of course the extraordinary, ordinary people I met along the way. Children especially, with their unguarded minds and fearless honesty, turned out to be some of my greatest teachers.
Through it all, I discovered the most profound gift: silence, the one that Francis Bacon once called “the sleep that nourishes wisdom.”
Genki Yatra is a homecoming through all the steps of my path. It is a living journey, not fixed but unfolding, woven from silence and play, language and movement, care and imagination. What I share now with communities, organisations, and individuals is not just a method, but an open space to grow, contribute, and keep learning together.