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Mirjana

I would say that it’s been quite a new experience overall—a fantastic experience. It’s really “me time,” doing something for me. I feel energized. I have absolutely no pain in my body. I feel very soft and relaxed. I feel more resilient and I feel very good. I feel I get everything that I need in this practice.

Doing one program is very good for me. Basically the same exercises—it’s like a program—but still in Baseworks, it feels like I’m learning something new in every class. It’s the same exercises before—I would think that maybe that would be boring for me—but it’s like I’m exploring so much more. I get so many more dimensions in every exercise that we do.

Sometimes there are really small movements that make the difference. Even though it’s the same, it’s like I just realize things, and that feeling of realizing something is very good. Also, the mental part—I feel it’s very, very good for me.

I would say the key thing is that I really love the philosophy. We are not supposed to push. When I could feel that the first time when I entered this, there was something special in this energy. In the world where everything is just pushing, pushing, pushing, and everyone is just going outside their boundaries, and I’ve been doing that myself—I think that is why I’ve been feeling stressed at times earlier in my life.

I’m in a phase where I’m really trying to learn not to push myself beyond my boundaries and really listen to my body, listen to myself, listen to my feelings. That is very much aligned with what I see that we are doing here with this practice—to not go beyond your limits and not push your body, even though you can do it, because that is what I always did. I knew I could, so I did, but then there is a cost afterwards.

After the class, I feel that I’ve been doing really good training. There’s no doubt that it’s very good training. I can feel my stomach muscles, and I don’t think I ever experienced that in my life even though I’ve been doing so much training. Wow, where did that come from?

A lot of the exercises are the same, and you do the same many, many times, but with that comes that you really get the depth and you really get the presence and awareness in your body and your movements and how you’re using the strength.

I think you have a very good balance between exercise and mental well-being. There’s some kind of consciousness in it—conscious movements you’re doing. You are in your body and in the movement in every step you take. Every clear description of the training—it feels like everyone has the full picture of the context of what it is we are doing here.

It’s getting me to a point where I feel relaxed and happy. I think it’s extremely good. The practice we do here is really helpful in your daily life, I would say, in many different aspects. Everybody would gain something from it—mindfulness and flexibility and awareness of the body movements.

Overall, I’m getting more flexible, much stronger in the core, and I think I’m more aware of my movement in the upper body. I start to learn more about my body as well. I can control my movements better and I’m more aware, actually, of different things that I wasn’t before. I think that the awareness of your movements is something that improved a lot for me.

The pain actually disappears. The pain that is gone is much better for me, of course. When you take these classes, one of the key things is that you should be more in a rest-and-digest mode in all the movements and don’t push yourself above that level.

If you’re translating that into daily life, it really means that when you have maybe some situations at home or at work for that matter, you start to think about that. Do I need to push myself into this more stressed state, or can I keep myself relaxed and by that influence others and maybe help others to avoid becoming too stressed out?

Of course for me myself, I know that I can also be stressed out—I mean, everybody can, you cannot control it 100%—but if you can reduce the amount of stress, it’s only good for yourself and for the environment that you interact with. If everybody can be a little bit calmer, I think that we can come up with better ideas and better results from discussions. I think that in certain areas, I try to actually use that insight to steer away from those more stressful situations.