About Me

Who am I?

Hi, my name is Alessandra Policreti, I live in the Canaries, on the island of Tenerife, but I was born in Rome, Italy.

I was always an extremely shy and insecure girl, this caused me a lot of stress because of the difficulty in interacting with others. In my life I have had episodes of stress, I have suffered from anxiety and even panic attacks.

Since a very young age I felt very restless and this drove me to seek the meaning of life from an early age.

This search led me to India, Nepal, Tibet, among other places in the world, and during these inner and outer trips I started meditating and practicing yoga.

Imperfect yoghini

In my life I worked in many fields, but what always interested me was something that would allow me to connect my emotions and my thoughts to my physical body, the only tangible thing in the here and now, and for this reason I became very passionate about dance, Pilates, Yoga and in particular Yantra Yoga, the Tibetan Yoga of Movement, in which I trained and eventually became instructor in 2010.

This yoga stands out among all others for being a system in which we work at a physical level but giving great importance to the breathing, which is connected to the energy that circulates in our body, and to presence of the mind.

Yantra Yoga teaches us to breathe in a more complete, relaxed and deep way. 

It was a great challenge for me to take on the role of a yoga teacher, because I never had a perfect body, neither very flexible nor particularly slim. My image was that what you imagined when you thought of a yoga teacher.

In Yantra Yoga the goal is not to hold a perfect position with the physical body, but rather to achieve a deep understanding of the relationship between the body’s posture and our breathing, and finally how this affects our state of mind as well.

Breathing

In the modern world, because of wrong postures and the stress of everyday life, most people breathe superficially and not in a smooth way, holding the air from time to time, in moments of tension, and this generates many physical and mental problems. For this reason ancient disciplines gave such importance to the breath, because if our breathing is deep and relaxed, our energy and our mind will also be more relaxed.

Respira is a method of exercises that allow us to work specifically with the breathing and relax it, a method that is suitable even for people who do not have the capacity (or lack the interest) to practice yoga, because these exercises can even be applied while sitting in a chair or standing. 

In 2016, after several years studying and practicing it, I became a certified Respira instructor. 

Meditation and Mindfulness

For quite a few years I have been teaching yoga and breathing, in person and online, and I have understood the importance of integrating the practice related to the physical body with the practice of mindful presence, which can help us manage stress and emotions in everyday life.

Spiritual practice has been essential in my life and for my personal development, particularly related to the Dzogchen teachings. These do not belong to any school or religious system, the word Dzogchen means ‘Total Perfection’ and it refers to the real nature inherent to all beings.   

It is not necessary to be spiritual people in order to understand the importance of being present and mindful. When we are distracted we act mechanically, while we are doing something we are already thinking about what we will do later on or about what we did yesterday, in this way we don’t realize that we are slaves of our emotions and our thoughts.

I began to study and deepen the issue of stress management and mindfulness because these are tools that can help all people in their daily lives, in a very practical and concrete way, without requiring a change in lifestyle, belief or religion.

 

 

 

My passions

My great passion, apart from Yantra Yoga, has always been dance. I love dancing, all kinds of dance, it makes me very happy and it allows me, like yoga, to feel the presence of my body and mind at once, in a way that is total and unmistakable.

Another passion of mine is trekking, walking in nature. When I forget that I am part of something bigger, like a cell of a single body of life, I need to go out and walk in nature until I forget about myself, about my individuality, to reconnect with the universe.