28 mrt Hannah Lou: Changing the world in the yoga studio
Hannah Lou (21) is up for a great adventure. At the start of summer our Bodybalance instructor leaves for Asia, where she will follow a six-week yoga course at a renowned Indonesian institute. No doubt it will be intense, with Vinyasa yoga starting very early in the morning until late in the evening.
She briefly summarizes her upcoming, daily schedule: “We get up at 6 am and start with two hours of yoga. After we have had a small breakfast, the rest of the day will be yoga, study, yoga, dinner, and we will be back in our rooms at 9 pm. The next day it starts all over again. Once a week we’ll have a day off. Then we go out with the teacher, for instance we will be visiting monks, eat traditionally Indonesian food and we’ll go mountain climbing. In total we will do 200 hours of yoga, after which I receive an official Vinyasa yoga certificate. A really good yoga instructor has at least 200/500 yoga hours, so 200 is a good start.”
Passion
It has been some year for Hannah Lou. Only when the German student started her bachelor’s degree in politics, she started doing Pilates and a bit later yoga too. In the summer of 2018, she was asked if she would like to be an instructor at mac. Nowadays, Hannah Lou teaches Bodybalance every Friday night at 7 p.m. “I love it,” she says when asked what yoga means to her. “Even though I am a bit worried that I will – eventually – start thinking teaching is work, and as a result I’ll lose the fun in yoga. But to be honest, last week I took part in a class by Nathaly. Then I realized again that yoga is really my passion.”
A better world
Yoga is ideal for de-stressing. That can be very useful in politics. “Working in politics is indeed a stressful way of life”, Hannah Lou agrees. “I love yoga, because it takes away the hustle and bustle of everyday life. You learn to focus and that you should take your time to do things. That does not happen in politics. But politics is also a passion. Politics is so full of changing the world. I also have the idea that I should make the poor richer or something. Perhaps every Friday I help healing the world a little bit with my classes, at least for the people in my class. My mother always says: ‘You can start helping as soon as you open the door.’ I really want to help others. That can be in politics or in the yoga studio.”