OM meets...
DANIELA DA SILVA
Founder of Blue House Yoga and a teacher to celebrities like the Beckhams, Daniela da Silva has come a long way since her early years in Brazil. She’s now pioneering in the acceptance of cryptocurrencies for retreat payments and embedding modern psychology into her classes
How did you first get into yoga?
Yoga happened to me in my mid-twenties. At that time, I was looking for my spiritual identity and change. I came across a yoga teacher training (Swasthya Yoga) based in Florianopolis and enrolled in 2008. Months after, armed with the courage of youth, I was giving yoga classes at a community centre in Itajai, on the south coast of Brazil. In that same year, I decided to move to the UK, but my English was non-existent, so I taught private lessons to any Portuguese-speaking person I could find. From the beginning, I found in yoga all that I was searching for.
What inspired you in those early days?
I grew up lacking a father figure, and found in yoga a metaphor for self-discipline or tough love; that is how I interpret my preference for physically challenging practices. In other words, what originally inspired me in my early days was that yoga represented masculine energy in my life, a promise that if I kept going, I was going to be rewarded in the future.
What does yoga give you personally?
Yoga gives me a stable home, which for me, is not a place but a feeling. In 1996, a fire burned down my house. My twin brothers (both aged four) tragically died in the accident. As a consequence of this loss, I became disconnected from my body for decades, never feeling safe or at home. My practice became a way of healing (until five years ago, I would still cry hard at the end of a yoga class). I am the living proof that asanas can touch hidden grief in our bodies; the crying was a passage for letting go of it! Now I feel that I have made peace with the past, and yoga was the mediator.