In the autumn of 2009 I arrived in Berlin, confident I was going to establish myself as a full-time yoga teacher, without much if any Deutsch skills. I had two “successful” years of teaching yoga in Stockholm under my belt, or so I thought.
But let me explain what I meant by successful. It meant that I arrived fresh out of the yoga teacher training mill, onto the burgeoning yoga scene in Stockholm, and within a year went from teaching two people for free in a city park to having a packed schedule of seventeen classes per week, that had me running from gym to studio and down to the bunker under the Swedish parliament, where I offered yoga classes to Swedish ministers after passing through metal detectors. Naturally, I was broke as hell, but was luckily at the time I had a partner who made more money.
Anyway, I felt very confident about my ability as a teacher. Already at that yoga instructor mill, a couple of the teachers had told me I was a natural. So why wouldn’t I be able to bring my fierce medicine to Berlin?
I arrived on a really hot day in August 2009. And soon thereafter I started checking out the Berlin yoga scene, and all that self-assurance rapidly drained away. Most studios were teaching one particular style or brand. There were studios offering Jivamukti, Anusara, Iyengar, Kundalooney, Ashtanga and Bikram (before all these so called lineages were tainted by guru scandals). I wasn’t trained in these styles. There also seemed to be very little interest in yoga in English. I approached a couple of places and all I received was a cold hard German no.
I wasn’t used to the German way of communication yet, so each one of those nos felt like a rusty arrow in my viking heart.
After approaching a space about hosting a donation-based yoga class and they told me that was a terrible idea, I decided to try to do my own thing.
I found a humble little storefront studio on a pretty cobblestoned street not far from my house in Prenzlauer Berg. The owners were ageing hippies, but real. And nice. They were into this stuff before it was trendy, before it was a style, a fashion statement. Before everyone was a yoga teacher/dj/light worker.
We agreed that I would rent the room twice a week and I made some flyers and posters that I distributed around the area. I managed to get a little group of four or five yogis together. After paying rent, and for candles, incense and flyers, I was pretty much teaching for free. I kept that going for a year, while more and more of that self-confidence evaporated, until it was nothing left.
During my first year in Berlin, my bank account was usually on minus. So I learned how to ‘schwarzfahren’ (riding the metro without paying) and I got to know the bargain basement depressing feel of Lidl in the aughts. And I got used to the stale piss-taste of Sternberger beer.
I’ve always been shit at self-promotion.
I said to myself; I guess I’m no longer a yoga teacher. And that started to feel fine. I’d find something else to do. I was doing some editing and translating, and occasionally working at an illegal supper club.
Along the way I picked up the occasional private class, and some sub gigs. And I started teaching a bunch of actors. At some point I responded to an ad on Craigs List for an editing job. That job ended up falling through, but the woman whom I with told me that she was about to open a yoga studio, and I told her I was a yoga teacher.
I will get in touch with you once we get closer to opening, she said.
Yeah yeah, I thought. Several months later she called me.
Here I must stop to point out how quickly things changed. RIP Craigslist, phone calls and yoga lineages without guru scandals.
Anyway, this woman had an idea of opening a yoga studio with a sliding scale of payment. At the start you paid €3, €6 or €9 for a yoga class in a studio in the heart of Kreuzberg. I gave her a picture a friend of mine had taken of me, wearing a pair of black H&M cotton leggings with what looked like paint splashes on them. Someone she knew cut out a part of that picture, featuring my left foot pressing into my right leg in Tree pose, made a flyer and printed a thousand of them and started distributing them around Kreuzberg.
And this was the random start of my “yoga career” in the German capital. Finally, my “raw talent” got the exposure it needed to catapult me into making enough money so I could afford to buy a ticket when I needed the U-bahn. And once again I could drink beer that probably wouldn’t turn me blind.
The sliding scale fee yoga studio was a success among students and poor hipsters in Berlin’s Kreuzberg and Neukölln. Woohoo!
I believe that the well-intended system might have helped pave the way for what came next.
Because people would be showing up for class with a €5 Starbucks coffee in their hand, wearing €200 Acne jeans but paying the lowest price on the sliding scale …
And there would be people popping up into handstand in the lobby and in Savasana. Bags of drugs in the Lost & Found. Eating disorders and cocks and scrotums popping out of short shorts.
TBC next week.