Breath-led Yoga Classes to Help You Feel Stronger, Calmer and More Present

Learn more about Jyotika

• Tell us more about your subject. How did you develop an interest in this field?

  Yoga found me at a time when I needed stillness more than I needed answers. I came to the mat not as a spiritual seeker but as someone simply trying to feel at home in my own body.. to return to myself after days that had pulled me in every direction.
  
  What surprised me was how quickly the practice moved beyond the physical. How a single breath, held consciously, could shift something deep inside. How the mat became less of a place I went to do something, and more of a place I went to remember something - who I was underneath all the noise, the roles, the expectations.
  
  I trained as a certified Vinyasa yoga teacher, and what drew me to Vinyasa specifically is the way it links movement to breath. It isn't just exercise.. It's a conversation between the mind and the body, happening in real time. And once that conversation begins on the mat, it doesn't stop when you roll it up. You start to notice it everywhere: in the way you respond to stress, in the way you inhabit a difficult moment, in the way you simply walk through a room.

• What or who is the motivation behind you choosing to teach & why?

  Teaching was never really a decision I made — it was something that grew naturally out of my own practice.
  
  My motivation is deeply personal. Yoga gave me a relationship with my own body, and with myself, that I hadn't had before. In a world that constantly asks us to perform, to optimise, to be a certain way.. yoga was the first place I'd found that simply asked me to arrive. No agenda. No image to maintain. Just this breath, this body, this moment.
  
  
  I teach because I want others to have that too. Not a "perfect pose," but a genuine sense of presence in their own skin — and the ability to carry that presence off the mat, into their actual lives. That, to me, is worth more than any flexibility milestone.

• How does your work help society?

  We live in a time of extraordinary external noise — constant connectivity, performance pressure, the relentless rush of city life. There's an invisible script most of us are handed: be productive, be visible, keep moving. Yoga, almost quietly, has become a form of resistance to that script.
  
  What the practice offers is a counterweight - a space to pause without guilt, to breathe without an agenda, to reconnect with yourself before the world gets a chance to tell you who to be that day. And what's remarkable is that this reconnection doesn't stay contained to the mat. Students begin to notice it in their relationships, in their decision-making, in the quality of their attention. The practice follows them home.
  
  
  My classes.. Whether one-on-one or in a group, they are built on the belief that a person who feels grounded within themselves moves through the world with more clarity and compassion. In that way, even one session can ripple outward in ways that are hard to measure but very real.

• If you had to think of a role model for your work, who do you think of & why?

  My role models are not one person but a lineage — my teachers, their teachers, and their teachers before them. Every person who carried this practice forward with sincerity, who taught it not as a performance or a product but as a living, breathing way of being. I feel a deep sense of gratitude to all of them, known and unknown, for bringing something so quietly profound into the world and keeping it alive.
  
  What they passed down is far more than a series of postures. Yoga, at its heart, is a practice of becoming — continuously, patiently, moving toward a better version of yourself. Not better by the world's standards, but truer to your own. And in a world where we are constantly seeking validation from the outside — from social media, from achievements, from other people's opinions — that is an almost radical thing to practise.
  
  What yoga has taught me, more than anything else, is that the answers I was looking for were never really outside of me. The practice creates the conditions to go inward, to sit with yourself long enough to hear what's actually there — and to discover that even in stillness, even without the noise and the striving, you can feel whole. Complete. Enough.
  
  That is the greatest gift my teachers gave me. And it is what I hope, in my own small way, to pass forward.

• Tell us about your hobbies outside teaching.

  Outside of teaching, I am someone who is deeply nourished by the simple, sensory pleasures of life. I love to cook — there's something almost meditative about it, the chopping, the smell, the patience of waiting for something to come together. It asks you to be present in a way that feels very close to practice.
  
  I love spending time with children. There's a quality of attention they have - completely unfiltered, completely in the moment — that I find genuinely grounding. They remind me of what it looks like to exist without self-consciousness, and honestly, I think I learn from them as much as I give.
  
  I love to travel, and more than the destinations, I love what happens when I step out of routine — the way the senses wake up, the way perspective shifts. And within travel, it's nature that does something to me that nothing else quite does. Standing somewhere vast and quiet, by the sea, in the mountains, under a wide open sky - there are moments where life feels almost too beautiful to hold. I find myself just breathing it in, grateful to be there.
  
  I journal, and have for years. A lot of my thoughts about yoga, about breath, about what this practice means to me, were first worked out in a notebook before they ever made it into a class.
  
  And perhaps most of all, I love holding space. For conversations that go somewhere real, for people who need to be heard without being fixed. I think that quality, more than anything, is what eventually shaped me into a teacher. The desire to simply be present with someone, without agenda, without rush, and to let that presence itself be enough.

• Do you have an anecdote to tell us about your student or professional life?

  There's a student I worked with who came to yoga entirely sceptically, she'd been told it would help her anxiety, but she kept apologising mid-class for "doing it wrong." She was a high-achiever in every area of her life, and the mat, for her, was just another place to perform.
  
  For the first few sessions, she barely let herself breathe fully. Then one day, about a month in, she stayed back after class and said quietly: "I didn't think about my to-do list for a whole hour. That's never happened before."
  
  That moment has stayed with me. Because what had shifted wasn't her flexibility or her technique.. it was her relationship with herself, even briefly. She had come home to her own body for an hour, and she hadn't even realised it was happening until it was over.
  
  That's what the practice does when it works. It doesn't announce itself. It just slowly, quietly, brings you back to yourself.. on the mat, and then, gradually, everywhere else too.