If your personality were a yoga pose, which one would you be?

Dancer’s pose. Always.

It has been my favourite yoga pose for as long as I can remember, but I also think it has become a bit of a life motto for me. I really believe we should try to dance through life as much as possible, even when there is a storm, even when it rains, maybe especially when it rains.

There is a Dutch saying I love: “Het leven is een feestje, maar je moet zelf de slingers ophangen.” Life is a party, but you have to hang the decorations yourself.

That doesn’t mean pretending everything is wonderful. Life can be messy and painful and unfair. But I think we always have some choice in how we meet it. Can we stay open? Can we stay curious? Can we still find something to dance about?

I think that is probably what Dancer’s pose means to me.

What’s your most unnecessary talent?

I am secretly quite a nerd, which people do not always expect from someone who has spent the past fifteen years in yoga studios.

I genuinely love numbers and I can spend a ridiculous amount of time playing around with them, looking for patterns, calculating things and making spreadsheets for absolutely everything. Luckily, this is quite useful when you run a business, although perhaps slightly less essential when you are teaching yoga.

Then again, I have always been very curious about how things work, whether that is a business, a group of people or a human being, so maybe it all belongs to the same slightly nerdy part of my brain.

If you weren’t running Balanzs, what do you think you’d be doing?

I think I would probably still be building something.

After working in telecom for years, I realised quite strongly that I wanted to spend my time on something that had meaning beyond just making money or having a career. I wanted to do something that could somehow make people’s lives a little better.

At the same time, I have always believed that purpose and entrepreneurship are not opposites. Actually, I think they can strengthen each other. If you want to create something that has a real and lasting impact, it also needs to be able to sustain itself.

So I would probably still be an entrepreneur, just with another idea, another name and, knowing me, far too many plans at the same time.

If you could invite the whole Balanzs community anywhere in the world for one day, where would we go?

I don’t think I would take everyone to Bali, although I realise that would probably be the expected yoga answer. 😉

I think I would take everyone somewhere where we could actually do something together and be useful. Maybe a city or a community where a few thousand Balanzs people could spend a day helping in very ordinary ways: cooking, planting, cleaning, listening, helping someone with something practical, spending time with people who are lonely, playing with children, whatever was actually needed there.

And then at the end of the day I would love for everyone to come together, move, eat, laugh and probably dance.

Because the older I get, the more I feel that this is what yoga should ultimately be about. Not becoming better at yoga, but becoming better at being human. The things you practise on the mat only really become interesting when you start using them in the rest of your life.

What’s one thing about Balanzs that you’re especially proud of?

I think I am most proud when I hear that something someone experienced at Balanzs has travelled home with them.

For me, yoga was never supposed to stay on the mat or inside the studio. I believe very strongly in we-care instead of only self-care. Of course we need to take care of ourselves, but hopefully that gives us more space, patience and courage to care about somebody else too.

And the older I get, the more I believe that kindfulness is actually the evolution of strength.

We have often been taught that strength means pushing through, standing your ground, being independent, winning the argument or simply being tougher. But I increasingly think real strength is also being able to pause when you are angry, to stay open when you are afraid, to listen when everything in you wants to defend yourself, and to choose kindness without confusing kindness with weakness.

When I see even a little bit of that happening in our community, that makes me incredibly proud.

What’s one thing you’ve learned from the Balanzs community?

That people need people much more than we sometimes like to admit.

I just turned 50, which still feels a little strange to write, and the older I get, the more I realise how much of life comes down to connection. We can make things incredibly complicated, but often what matters most is very simple: someone remembers your name, someone notices that you are new, someone asks how you are and actually waits for the answer, someone makes space for you on a difficult day.

I think these things are becoming even more important now. We live in a time where it is very easy to retreat into our own worlds, our phones, our opinions, our fears, and I think staying connected to other human beings, and to the values that make us human, requires more intention than perhaps it used to.

The Balanzs community has taught me again and again that those small moments of connection are not small at all.

What’s one Balanzs moment from the past 15 years that you’ll never forget?

This is almost impossible to answer because there are so many.

Of course I remember the big things: opening studios, seeing full classes, celebrations, and those slightly surreal moments where I looked around and thought, how did this little idea become all of this?

But the moments that stay with me most are often much smaller. Someone telling us that Balanzs helped them through a horrible period. A teacher staying behind after class because somebody needed to talk. Someone walking into a studio feeling awkward and completely out of place, and then months later feeling completely at home.

Those moments always bring me back to what we actually built, because in the end it was never really about buildings, schedules or yoga classes.

We built places where people meet each other.

What’s something completely unrelated to yoga that you could talk about for hours?

Human behaviour. Although I realise that I will probably connect this back to yoga within about three minutes, so I may already be failing the question. 😉

I am endlessly fascinated by why we behave the way we do. Why fear can make perfectly lovely people behave badly, why we become defensive, why we need to be right, why groups behave differently from individuals, and why kindness can sometimes require much more courage than anger.

I think this is also why I still believe so strongly in mindful movement, because it gives you a place to practise. You notice discomfort, impatience, comparison, frustration, the urge to give up, and then hopefully you learn that you do not have to react immediately to everything you feel.

But of course the real test starts after class.

For years I have said that I don’t really care how beautiful your downward dog is. Your yoga class was a success if somebody almost runs you over with their bike afterwards and you can pause long enough not to completely lose it.

That pause is where it gets interesting.

Because being calm in savasana is lovely, but being able to stay kind when you are tired, scared, angry or annoyed is, for me, much closer to the real practice.