Journey That Wrote Me
In the fall of 2000, I climbed the stairs of a yoga shala on Eerikinkatu for the first time. I didn’t know it then, but that step would begin a journey that would slowly rewrite me — again and again.
This is one attempt to put that journey into words.
It also marks the first public entry on this site. A background to what I write and why.
When I began, yoga was everywhere. The media served up exoticism and idolized flexible bodies. People queued up for beginner courses.
After my own beginner course, I didn’t look back or slow down — for nearly fifteen years. Some called it discipline, others an obsession. To me it felt more like a dreamlike call I couldn’t refuse.
I fumbled and marveled at something entirely new. And things just followed one another:
The first lotus pose. I felt like a Jedi.
The first early (and traditional) morning practice — for which I (non-traditionally) fueled myself with Mars bars.
The first trip to India, where (to my knowledge) I managed to dodge most of the usual tourist scams, even in Delhi.
The first class I ever taught (far too early), where neither of the two students returned. (If you’re reading this: my apologies — I’ve learned a bit more mercy since.)
India
My first journey to the global hub of Ashtanga Yoga in Mysore was long. A red-eye flight to London, half a day of waiting — and nearly 12 hours later I was back where I started, above the clouds of Helsinki.
That trip launched nearly a decade of annual visits. Ten years later, I returned home carrying a rare teaching authorization, deeply respected by the community.
All in all, I spent several years in India. The country, the community, and the practices enchanted and challenged me. Those years demanded surrender, softening, and trust. I wrestled with egos — especially my own.
In India, I also received a glimpse that would shape everything that came after.
On the second-to-last day of my second trip, a certainty arose. A quiet, whisper-like knowing that life would carry me to teach in Copenhagen. The idea was absurd — but the feeling was unquestionable. And again, things followed one another:
When the opportunity opened a few years later, as if by itself, it already felt familiar. My address changed to Copenhagen.
Four years later, on May Day, I opened my own yoga studio — on perhaps the most beautiful street in Frederiksberg. Over time, the silence of the space deepened in a way that made it more meaningful than the practices themselves.
Teaching invitations took me elsewhere in Denmark, as well as to South Africa, Thailand, Poland, Sweden, and back to Finland. At times I felt like a rockstar — though I usually masked it as spirituality.
Circles
My yoga was first shaken not long after I moved to Denmark. New teachers and the Kaivalyadhama lineage of pranayama (breathwork) opened an entirely new world of inner stillness.
As if a three-dimensional life had received a translucent fourth — a quiet that wasn’t empty, but full. My practice shifted permanently.
Many other things had also changed since that first climb up the stairs on Eerikinkatu.
Step by step, my experience — and along with it, my teaching — curved away from techniques, doing, and even the traditions that once felt essential. My years in Denmark were marked by a growing inner movement away from what I still outwardly taught. Traditions and forms began to dissolve — revealing more clearly the direct experience they had always pointed toward.
Eventually, the practices I began with felt as if they had given me everything they could. Perhaps that was their true purpose: to make themselves unnecessary.
In early 2020, when the pandemic closed the doors of yoga studios, a circle quietly closed. Teaching in its old form went on pause — and looking back now, it stayed that way.
Almost two years earlier, I had returned to Finland after over a decade abroad. Since then, alongside slow steps toward a PhD and studies of all kinds, I’ve turned my attention — with humility — to the most profound and challenging teaching of all: parenthood.
Stillpoint.zone
Stillpoint refers to a space where time seems to pause. A moment where urgency, effort, noise, boundaries, and opposites dissolve. What remains is silence and clarity.
Stillpoint Zone opens a window into that space — not by searching, but by forgetting what’s unnecessary. Not more tips, insights or goals — but invitations to pause in moments where peace, joy and simplicity aren’t sought anymore, but quietly remembered.
At its heart, this isn’t about happiness — but about what happens when we stop asking how to find it.
Writing has always been my most natural way of expressing. It allows the message to reveal itself in ways that speech often can’t. Written words don’t vanish into the air — they give the reader space to pause, and to return to them in their own rhythm, between the words and the silences in between.
A few, perhaps useful, things to know:
Stillpoint.zone isn’t really about yoga or non-duality — even if they’ve shaped its foundation. It’s more about what remains once all definitions gently step aside.
Rather than offering answers, I try to raise questions — the kind that might, in the end, reveal more than any definite answer ever could.
In addition to all of the above, I’ve also worked as a journalist, photographer, and in various communications roles. I hold a Master’s degree in social sciences. So in the eyes of the world, I’ve been what you might call normal — presentable, and free of too many questions.
I’m a Star Trek fan.
Thank you for joining a journey that doesn’t lead to a destination — but pauses exactly when you least expect it.
