Yoga

This same companion one day invited me to try a bit of yoga in her backyard, where we started attempting some physical poses that she made look so simple and graceful, filled with relaxation. But when I tried, I realized it wasn’t as easy as it seemed, and this triggered a reaction of feelings of anger and frustration because I immediately realized how little interest I had put into having a healthy physical body until that day, and that was exactly what made me want to try the yoga practice.

I started taking yoga classes with this same friend of my then companion, and I still remember that first class, so physically challenging for me, how much I sweated, how much I suffered, but at the end of the session, during the final relaxation, I had a mystical moment. For the first time in my life, I was experiencing and feeling inner peace. Upon expressing this to my friend and my sudden interest in having this sensation again, her response was: come to class tomorrow!

In the early years, my contact with yoga was erratic and without much discipline, practicing for a month, and then leaving it for 2, however, gradually I began to understand the profound scope of the practice, how good it was for my body, and my interest in continuing to practice and explore my body and mind kept growing, as did my discipline to do so.

After a few years and after the practice had become a bit more stable, I began to welcome within myself the possibility of taking a training, more than thinking about becoming a teacher, to deepen my personal practice and knowledge of yoga. There was a very specific moment in which I had the commitment and decision, my exact words were: “I am going to take the path of yoga with discipline to see where it takes me” without having an idea of the changes and the incredible life that awaited me on the other side, so I decided to fully engage in the practice for 2 years before entering my first teacher certification in 2016, at Yoga Mandir, in San José, a renowned school known for its high quality and focus on a traditional form of yoga.

Once that time had passed, I was sure that yoga was my path and that I was ready to take that next step, to the point that I decided to quit my job to focus the next 4 months on training, under the understanding that it is a transformative process, and that whoever would emerge from the other side would be a new Julián.

Once the training was over, it only took 2 months for me to encounter the possibility of moving to Nosara, to work in a hotel, not knowing for certain the radical life change that this would bring for me. Once in Nosara, I began to take classes with all kinds of teachers and styles, from hatha, yin, restorative, aerial, kundalini, and eventually other types of healing and movement practices such as vipassana, breathwork, animal flow, capoeira, and ecstatic dance, all of which, in one way or another, contributed to my yoga style and teaching. Additionally, I had the opportunity to do a second yoga training under the guidance of my favorite teacher, Rebecca Kovacs, who has learned from the master Dharma Mitra.

Since 2019, I have been dedicated full-time to teaching yoga, in different hotels, privately, for festivals and retreats, and today it is an honor to have weekly classes at Harmony Healing Center and Bodhi Tree Yoga Resort and to take yoga not only as my purpose and service but as a lifestyle.

I like to see each of my classes as a ceremony, a ritual of self-awareness, weaving concepts from Vipassana meditation to invite us to use our body and its sensations as a petri dish for an experiment, so that this microcosm shows us how our mind relates to all aspects of reality, to use breathing as a tool to understand the patterns that make our mind feel aversion to sensations it judges as unpleasant and attachment to sensations judged as pleasant. My classes are an opportunity to restore the right relationship between the body and the mind through breathing and thus reconnect and remember our true nature.

We cultivate the qualities of equanimity, curiosity, and flow, always giving ourselves important space for alignment and intuitive experience that allow us to have a safe practice in which we adapt the postures to our body and not the other way around. These classes are fun and informative and allow us to challenge ourselves to reach the deepest layers of our being.