25 Years of Yoga Moves — The Story of How We Got Here
September 2026
Before There Was a Studio
I moved to the Netherlands in 1997, following love to a country I barely knew, expecting a few years of European adventure before heading back to California. Nearly thirty years later, I'm still here.
Yoga wasn't new to me — I'd danced my way through my teens and twenties, dabbled in yoga along the way, trained with teachers like Rodney Yee back in Berkeley, and had a life-changing first glimpse of Ashtanga Vinyasa on a porch in Hawaii with Maty Ezraty. But when I landed in the Netherlands, homesick and without my Public Health professional foothold, I needed something to connect to. So I did what probably wasn't the most sensible thing: I signed up for a three-year intensive Iyengar teacher training in Amsterdam, hoping partly that I'd make some friends along the way.
I did. And somewhere in the middle of that training, I started teaching a few classes myself, blending the alignment-focused Iyengar approach with the flowing, sweatier Ashtanga-based practice I'd fallen for in California. Eventually I rented a room by the hour in an old karate school here in Utrecht — Shudo kan, located on the Oudegracht (now it's Balanzs Studio) — and started inviting people in, quite literally, walking shop to shop along the canal, introducing myself and asking everyone if they ever had heard of Power Yoga? Most had not. Some got curious and came along to try a class.
YogaMotion
That rented room had its own charm. Many of you go back to those days with your own memories. For many, they had never heard of sweaty yoga classes. I remember people saying things after class like: "What was that?" And "THAT was powerful!" We would roll out of class into the showers and changing room of the even sweatier karate men. We only took cash and gave everyone their paper stripper-card to keep track. It was a fun time. We grew the classes nevertheless. I invited some of my yoga teacher friends from Amsterdam to join me to teach, namely: Marlene Henny. Then Katiza Ivulic and I boldly started teaching people how to teach Power Yoga. We were on a roll. We ran YogaMotion for about four years.
Becoming YogaMoves
At some point I started to look around for a space of my own. Enough of dirty toilets and naked men when we came out of class! I was paying around €1000 (or was it guildens?) a month in rent for the space which felt like a threshold amount. In addition, the landlord's girlfriend accused me of having an affair with her husband (not!) because I was friendly towards him. She started getting scary. It felt like time to move. Finding space with the right business permission was not easy. But I found a storage garage in the back of a shop off the Biltstraat. No windows of its own, but it had potential.
Then came a plot twist: a small studio elsewhere in the country had trademarked the name "YogaEmotion," and challenged my use of YogaMotion. A judge ruled that YogaMotion was too close for comfort. I had to change the name. It stung at the time — but out of it came YogaMoves, a name I've grown to love far more. (Small, satisfying footnote: years later, when someone else tried to use the name Yoga Moves for their Amsterdam studio, I was the one sending the stop-letter.)
2004: YogaMoves Finds Its Home
In 2004, after a messy and colorful remodel, we moved into the space many of you know — down that long hallway off the Biltstraat on Sint Janshovenstraat (Studio One). The original layout was almost comically tight: one small yoga room, a cubbyhole of a back office, a little kitchenette, a massage room, and — somehow — two full changing rooms with showers, squeezed into the same space that is now Studio 2; a space that seems impossible in hindsight. We painted the walls with Mexican bright colors.
The Biltstraat was a kind of wasteland of job-searching offices. Not even one cafe yet. No trendy shops. Years later we would have people tell us they won't leave the neighborhood because Yoga Moves had become their second home. That felt good. Classes were often mat to mat. Volunteers helped me grow and became some of the teachers you know today. It was growing organically and was exciting. I started to invite more international teachers to Utrecht and sometimes hosted them in Amsterdam too. We had a lot of fun. Sometimes it was stressful, I won’t lie.
We grew fast, and by 2008 we'd clearly outgrown our one room studio. We broke through into the office space next door, and — on the advice of my architect, who overruled my instinct to keep costs down — we rebuilt the bathrooms and showers entirely rather than patch around them. We put the large sliding doors between the two studios. We opened the thick walls between the hallway and the now entrance, tea room and changing areas. It was a hard, expensive, occasionally disastrous process (ask anyone who was around for the sewage blockage situation), but it gave us the layout we still use today.
So Why 25 Years? From Then to Now
Two years ago, we celebrated 20 years of Studio One — 20 years since YogaMoves found its permanent home on Sint Janshovenstraat. But the story itself began several years earlier, in that first rented room under the name YogaMotion. Because the roots go back further than Studio One itself. The teaching, the training, the philosophy, the community-building — all of that began years earlier, in that first rented room, under the name YogaMotion, before YogaMoves as we know it existed. Twenty-five years traces the fuller arc: from the very first class in a borrowed room to where we are today.
Both anniversaries are true. Twenty years honors the home we built. Twenty-five honors the whole journey — the teacher trainings, the early classes, a name lost and a better one found, Covid, adding new studios and new friends, and a community that somehow grew out of one American woman walking up and down the Oudegracht, in broken Dutch, inviting strangers to breathe, move and sweat with her.
There's a lot more to this story — the teachers who passed through those early training programs and went on to build their own classes or studios and train their own students; the funny, painful, human moments of building something from nothing. We'll be sharing more of it with you throughout this anniversary celebration period this fall: in posts, in videos, and in person, this coming November.
For now: thank you for 25 years — however you count them. May we be moving and breathing together for another 25!
- Hilary
