My yoga journey didn't start with a long-bearded guru from an ashram in the middle of nowhere. My yoga journey started with an engineer. A biomedical engineer.
Scary right? Not really. Extremely interesting, instead, for a disenchanted western mind like mine.
I didn't want to practice yoga in the beginning, but the yoga "thing" has always been dormant, somewhere in a corner of my brain.
This engineer is the first person who, several years ago, introduced me to yoga.
Her name is Alessia Baretta and she is so eclectic that, like she explained, she has two "roommates" in her brain: the engineer and the yogi.
The engineer makes my life pretty organized, the yogi makes the engineer see things from a more distant perspective, preventing burnouts.
She defines herself a "researcher" and as such, her method is analytic and experimental.
I like this approach because it is based on facts and not on fool myths.
Your body can move in many different ways, yoga is not the only right thing to do, it is one option.
She approaches a thousand-year old discipline in a rigorous scientific manner, keeping spirituality as a "deeply intimate way to find your place in the world".
This is definitely my cup of tea!
A couple of years ago she founded Somatic Competence yoga, "the first trauma-informed (yoga) approach in Italy. It takes into account the complexity of the delicate body-mind relation and aims at stimulating in the practitioner an exploratory attitude of body re-claiming".
During her classes, even the online ones, I had the feeling that somebody was taking care of my mental and physical health. I was not in front of a doctor though, her voice entered my brain on tiptoe and guided me through the journey.
"I believe you have to start thinking that trauma is hidden in different forms in everyone of us. We train teachers to recognize the discomfort in their students and guide them to build a safe space, a space that is felt safe for their autonomic nervous system".
She is an engineer after all!
Since Somatic Competence Yoga is not a yoga style but an approach, it has been integrated in many other projects that involve not just yoga, like the women-only courses on pelvic area awareness.
Last but not least, she is going to publish very soon a book, co-written with Mark Morbe, psychologist and one of the co-founders. This is a great opportunity to understand more about the SCY approach and yourself, above all.
My yoga journey is still an ongoing process. Meeting Alessia has been a milestone and it had to be told!
Follow Alessia in the social media, you never know what she is going to pull out of the hat next!
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