Software Engineer Who Trained to Be a Yoga Instructor

Finding Yoga (Again)

The seeds of yoga were planted in me by my friend. My idea of yoga until then was that you hold a variety of poses and that’s that. I wasn’t sure of “for what”. I was a bodyweight workout person in my early 20s, then a gym freak post-COVID. Around that time, my friend went knee-deep into her yoga practice. She would post her Apple Watch hitting 300 calories. I was like… wait, yoga is supposed to do that? How? Isn’t it supposed to be calming?

By the end of 2024, I left the gym, and my body stopped moving completely as I focused purely on my career. Big mistake.

In 2025, I went back to yoga, hoping for a cozy start into the fitness journey unlike the gym. It was anything but cozy. I started doing vinyasa. Breathless, barely conscious, barely able to move my body after. That was my chat exchange with my friend after one such vinyasa class. But I kept coming back: beginner classes, YouTube videos, not consistently but regularly, hopping onto the mat.

Around this time, the AI boom was also happening, and in the moments of pure existential crisis, it made sense to think about alternate modes of income. Long term, my retirement plan was to teach tech to other people. In the AI era, if I’m not teaching tech, what else am I teaching?