What Is Calling You Deeper?
Somewhere right now, someone is unrolling their mat in a small apartment, or sitting at the edge of their bed before the day begins, or stealing five minutes between everything that the world is asking of them. Their body is carrying weight. Their heart is full in ways that are hard to name. And somewhere underneath all of it, there is a quiet, persistent pull — toward something older, something truer, something they can actually stand on.
Maybe that is you.
And maybe you have also noticed something else — that after some time on the mat, the practice does not stay there. It starts to show up in how you speak to someone you love when you are tired. In how you hold yourself when the news is unbearable. In the choices you make when no one is watching. This is not an accident. It is the point. The mat was never the destination. It was always the training ground for the rest of it.
If that is where you are, I want to speak directly to you.
This is not about poses
Yoga, in the way we hold it at Manas, is not a fitness practice. It is not a wellness trend, a lifestyle aesthetic, or a method of managing yourself so you can be more productive in a world that is consuming everything it touches.
Yoga is a philosophy of liberation. It is a lineage. It is a tradition that has survived colonisation, commercialisation, and countless attempts to hollow it out and sell it back to people in pieces. What remains — what has always remained — is something that cannot be packaged. The recognition that you are not separate from what you seek. That freedom is not a destination. That practice is how you learn to live what you already know.
That is the yoga we are talking about. That is the yoga worth protecting.
The mat and the life are not separate
Some of us come to yoga through a slow, steady unfolding — not a dramatic conversion, but a quiet accumulation. Years of practice in private. A yoga class here and there. A growing sense that the breath, the stillness, the ethical inquiry is seeping into the rest of life in ways we did not plan for.
This is what the tradition calls integration. And it does not happen in a straight line.
It moves more like a spiral. You return to the same questions — about how to live, how to relate, how to act with integrity in an unjust world — and each time you arrive with a little more clarity, a little more capacity to hold the complexity. What you are learning on the mat about your own patterns, your own resistance, your own capacity for presence, is not separate from how you show up in your relationships, in your work, in your community. It is the same inquiry, expressed differently.
Real practice is when you can no longer draw a clean line between the two. When the way you breathe through discomfort in a long hold is the same way you breathe through a difficult conversation. When the non-grasping you practice in stillness becomes the way you hold your politics — present, committed, but not clutching. When what you learn about yourself on the mat has opened your heart in a much bigger way.
This integration — inner and outer, personal and collective — is not a stage you reach. It is the practice itself.
The room that is forming here
The community gathering at Manas Yoga is not shaped by who can do a split or who has the right leggings. It is shaped by people who are done pretending that practice and politics are separate. People who know — in the deepest part of themselves — that what happens on the mat has to mean something off of it, or it means nothing at all.
The people who find their way here are teachers who found yoga in recovery and now carry that gift into jails and substance abuse homes. Social workers who are holding unbearable grief for the people they serve and still showing up. Practitioners teaching in their “ancestral language”, on their own terms. People who came to yoga through illness and found that most studios were not built for their body, and kept coming anyway.
Majority people of colour. Queer, trans, disabled, neurodivergent. Activated. Devoted. Grieving and grounded in the same breath.
These are not edge cases. This is the centre.
What does it mean to practice yoga in a moment like this?
I ask myself this regularly. I ask it as a practitioner with over three decades of experience. I ask it as someone who runs a studio, develops curriculum, leads retreats, and still sits with the same question every morning: what is being asked of me today?
The depth of this tradition is being erased. Diluted. Distorted into something that serves comfort rather than truth. And I believe those of us who know better — who have been given access to the roots — carry a responsibility that goes beyond our own transformation.
To practice yoga, really practice it, is to become a steward. Not just a student. Not just a consumer of teachings. But someone who protects the integrity of what has been passed down, who returns what was taken, who makes space for those who were pushed out.
Leadership in yoga is not only about teaching a class. It is about showing up with clarity and courage when the world is asking for something easier
You do not need to be who you think you need to be
I want to say this plainly, because it is perhaps the most important thing.
You do not need an advanced practice (whatever that means). You do not need to contort yourself into someone else’s version of what a yoga guide or practitioner looks like. You do not need to change your body, your size, your life circumstances, your diagnosis, your background.
The only thing that is required — truly required — is a genuine desire to go deeper. Intellectually. Spiritually. In your embodied life and in your relationships with others.
Yoga is not about shrinking yourself to fit a mould. It is the practice of returning to your own wholeness. And right now, in the world we are living in, it is also the practice of building something together that is actually worth building.
What we hold at Manas
At Manas Yoga Vienna, we are not trying to create a beautiful place to escape from the world. We are trying to create a space that is honest about the world — and that equips people to meet it with more depth, more courage, and more genuine connection to themselves and each other.
Our offerings — Rooted & Reclaimed, (for the LGBTQIa+, BIPOC), Karma Yogi work-trade, Meridian Yoga, Sliding scale pricing, Scholarships, Easy payment plans — are not programmes in a catalogue. They are commitments. A commitment to decolonising this practice. To economic accessibility. To queering wellness culture. To honouring the body as it actually is, not as we wish it were.
We are rooted in Advaita Vedanta, in the science of fascia and the wisdom of meridian theory, in the understanding that inner practice and outer engagement are not two different things. They never were.
If this is calling you
One of our graduates said it in a way I have not been able to improve upon:
“I wanted to make sure I was taking yoga in a way that was authentic to its lineage and its roots. This was the first time I was able to learn from many teachers of colour.”
If you feel the pull — not toward performance, not toward certification as an end in itself, but toward the real thing — that pull is worth trusting.
Yoga is calling those of us who are willing to be changed by it. To let the practice move off the mat and into the texture of how we live — our relationships, our choices, our willingness to stand for something. To hold both peace and power. To use whatever access, stability, and choice we have in service of a world that actually reflects the values we claim on the mat.
This is what we offer. Not a perfect practice. Not an easy path.
A real one.
With depth and fire, Erika and the Manas Yoga community