Having spent ten years in Rome exploring her Italian roots, and childhood summers in Germany with her mother’s family, Sandra seems to have taken the best bits from every culture and combined them into the enviable character traits of a vibrant and determined yogi blessed with insatiable curiosity.
When Sandra was quite young, she found her calling as an actress. While at drama school, she had an engaging movement teacher who began every warm-up with Surya Namaskar, instructing the students to observe the brilliance of this simple sequence. It reminded her of her German grandmother who started yoga in her 60’s and was doing standing splits well into her 70’s. She kept up a yoga practice outside of school and distinctly remembers an Iyengar class that left her on a higher plane, seeing new colours and experiencing otherworldly feelings and it allowed her to glimpse the deep transformational power of yoga.
Her father was a famous Italian journalist and TV personality. And while she was raised speaking Italian with her father and German with her mother, she didn’t feel fully connected to one culture or the other. After her father’s passing in 2000, she decided to take three months and live life as an Italian, certain she’d hate it. She ended up living in Rome for ten years.
While in Italy, she continued her yoga practice, trying several studios and maintaining a home practice as well. A yoga teacher she respected set up her own studio and while she was a student there, she indirectly learned about the business of yoga and how to run a successful studio.
After ten years in Rome, she returned to the UK, and decided upon a new direction for her life letting go of her identity as an actress and listening closely to her innermost voice. She took a six-month foundation course with the British Wheel of Yoga, but found that she needed more. She embarked on an intensive 200-hour course with YogaLondon, one of Europe’s largest yoga teacher training schools, and found her home and her calling. Though she began the course absolutely certain that she didn’t want to teach yoga, within short order of graduating, she was teaching and was incredibly successful. Combining her genuine nature with years of well-practiced technique meant that her teaching resonated with students and allowed her to prosper. After short order, the School Director at YogaLondon was asking her to teach on a 200-hour course and eventually the 500-hour yoga teacher training courses. She became a course leader on the 200- hour courses, guiding many students to realise their desire of deepening their yoga knowledge. Sandra also became the team leader for the teaching faculty at the school.
Sandra teaches locally (Surrey-U.K) and online a variety of styles: Ashtanga Vinyasa, Hatha Yoga, Power Yoga, Yin Yoga, Restorative Yoga, Yoga Nidra, Pranayama, Meditation and is about to add Aerial Yoga to her skill set. Her teaching style is warm, inclusive and authentic with a good dollop of humour.