update, September 19, 2020

You’re about to read the very first post I wrote for this blog, which was then still called Rock Star Yoga, and it was about yoga and Bon Jovi.
And now it’s called Rock Star Writer and it’s only about Bon Jovi and sometimes other rock music.
No longer about yoga.

Sometimes I still wake up in cold sweat in the middle of the night;
“I should change it back, right?!”             
But ultimately?               
No.        

Although I do intend to one day include new yoga stories and videos to this site, I am definitely more a writer than a yoga teacher.    

But do you know what I think? 
That ultimately I’m not even a writer either.     
In the end, it was all decided when I was still very young, and Bon Jovi stole my heart.

In the end I’m not a yoga teacher, nor a yoga practitioner, nor a writer.

In the end I am what I always was.

A Bon Jovi fan.

~Suzanne 

Rock Star Yoga | the very first “About” page

original post, July 22, 2019

As a yoga teacher my name is Suzanne Beenackers, but I also work under a pen name.

I ve been teaching yoga in Nijmegen since 2003, and since April 2019 I ve specialized in private classes.

After a Bon Jovi concert – or maybe I should say “after energetically preparing for this concert for months and reconnecting with being a fan of Bon Jovi having abandoned them because Jon reminded me too much of the boyfriend who broke my heart” – 
I saw the light.
But that’s pretty long, so let’s stick with:
Bon Jovi concert. 
Light.

It wasn’t that Rock Star Yoga was a new thing.
I had been toying with the concept or word Rock Star Yoga, since 2015. Perhaps even earlier, if I include calling it Rebel Yoga.
And in my final year of teaching groups, I taught Rock Star Yoga in January and February.
It was part of my standard curriculum.

But that was not THE Rock Star Yoga, that I m teaching through this site, and on my YouTube. 
Back then it was just a cool word, which I had borrowed from a teacher whose alignment principles I was teaching in those two months of the year.
It didn’t have anything to do with the download I received in the days after the concert.
An insight that had nothing to do with how you do your yoga. Not with taking yoga classes. It didn’t even have that much to do with yoga.

What I saw, and what I now preach and teach as Rock Star Yoga, was that my first years of practicing yoga – which was still back in the late nineties – had been the strongest.

That these years when I practiced yoga from books, and by memorizing what I had learned in my weekly class with my local yoga teacher – had already been what yoga was all about.
Before I let the outside world in, telling me how to do it.
Before I became a yoga teacher, getting paid for “pretending” that I knew how to do it. 

When in reality, looking back at it, I think:
“Nobody knows anything about how to do anything!”

Even the best yoga teacher, the most enlightened guru and the most expensive teacher training can only learn you, what you have already decided you want to receive.
They can be a tool, an instrument projecting your higher self, and in that they can teach you.

But it isn’t in their words, or in their books;
Not in their methods nor their yoga series.
It’s in you.

Which means it’s only a small step, to take the teacher out of the equation, and project it fully on the thing you feel inspired by.
Which in my case, is Bon Jovi.

So my yoga is: I put on Bon Jovi music and I do yoga.
And that’s what I ll be sharing in this blog.

IF you too, already have a vibe, an energy, an image surrounding yoga or completely unrelated like my Bon Jovi music;
Something that inspires you, and what makes you tapped in, switched on? 
Do not change a thing.
Work it from there.

I once heard from a girl who was frowned upon because she was just a beginner at fitness and already invested in expensive clothes.
Whereas now I think:
“That’s exactly right!”
Of course she could have done fitness in sweatpants and a t-shirt, but the new clothes represented what she wanted her future to be. They represented the idea, of fitness. 

The same way, my first twenty years of yoga were inspired by an image of Madonna, 1998, when she started promoting Ray of Light and said she owed her athletic body to Ashtanga yoga.
This late twentieth century vision of Madonna and yoga, was enough to lead me through two decades of yoga.
And maybe if I had built on that, it would have lasted to this day.

But now I have my Bon Jovi inspired Rock Star Yoga, and that is great. And it’s good to have a fresh start once in a while! 

This time around, I know how valuable it is to have your own vision.
So I m not going to put my Bon Jovi inspired yoga on the back burner the way I did then.
I m not going to put layers of proper yoga knowledge over it.
Not going to burden it with a career teaching it and a business model earning money from it:
Rock Star Yoga will first and foremost be a self-practice.
Just for me.
Everything else, even talking about it on YouTube or in this blog, comes later.

And that must be where Rock Star Yoga is different from all other forms of yoga: 
Rock Star Yoga is the yoga program and the version of yoga, you create yourself.

I’m not saying it’s not dangerous. 
Or that it’s not safer to learn it from a teacher.
(although it’s not, I think it’s extremely dangerous to rely on someone else)

But instead of proof on safe or not safe, I m going to take a Christian shortcut here: 
It’s way easier if you accept that the only safety, is connection to your higher self, your purpose and Source, or God.

I remember once being on a plane, and I was going to see someone I really wanted to see. If that flight had crashed I knew it was okay, because I knew I had to be, wanted to be, on that plane. 
Maybe that’s what Rock Star Yoga is about:
Making sure you’re on the right plane.
And stop flying to places because other people said they really liked it there.

Life is your own sold-out, sweaty, invigorating, rock n roll show. 
Now go fucking run it.

~Suzanne

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