Marielisa Padilla

In 2015 I went to Kerala and trained as a teacher at the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centre, two hundred hours of the classical form, and I have taught it ever since.

What I was taught there is simple to say and slow to learn: that yoga is five things practised together, that the breath comes before the body, and that rest is a skill.

Later I studied with the Isha Foundation in India, through Inner Engineering, the Bhava Spandana Program and the Shoonya Intensive, and in 2025 I completed its teacher training in Kuala Lumpur. The two schools differ in method; what I teach in class is the form I learned first.

I taught in Germany, where I lived before Cambodia, and now I teach in Siem Reap and online. Over the years my students have included beginners and experienced practitioners, university groups, company teams, community organisations and expectant mothers.

Before I taught yoga I was a researcher at Fraunhofer IAO in Stuttgart, on smart-city and urban-resilience projects, and I worked with GIZ. I mention it because it explains how I teach: I want to know why a thing works before I ask you to do it, and I am at ease in a room where everyone speaks a different language.

Becoming a mother changed my teaching. I trained as an infant sleep educator, and I now run the Understanding Baby Sleep workshop and gentle sleep coaching alongside prenatal and postnatal yoga.

I am also a certified Mindfulness & Resilience Facilitator with Happy for No Reason, Marci Shimoff's programme, and I offer a course built on it for companies and teams.