Michael James Wong (podcast)

I grew up in The Netherlands but moved to Ireland when I was 26, and that’s when I began to teach yoga full-time. While we were there, my husband built a yoga studio – the Boab Centre. It could only fit about 12 people in the room and was made of clay, with a grass roof. It was beautiful.

I was teaching 10 or 12 classes a week, each one full to bursting, yet I felt bad about the people who wanted to attend but couldn’t fit into the class. I didn’t have the resources to build a bigger centre in order to reach them. One day, when I was on a meditation retreat, I was walking in the forest and I suddenly had this idea to put classes online, so that more people could join. At that point, I hadn’t even considered that this could reach people all over the world – it was just a practical solution, aimed at people in the local villages.

I started small, on YouTube, and when that took off I decided that I wanted to create a subscription website, where people could access all kinds of yoga classes. EkhartYoga was launched in 2012 and since then it’s grown from just six teachers and three styles of yoga to a platform offering thousands of classes, programmes and in-depth learning resources for students and teachers alike! I’m still just so happy that it worked, that people actually subscribed.

I love what it does for people too; the responses are so lovely. We get so many emails, thank you notes and comments and it means the world to me. As long as it’s w