Ana Basa is the director and founder of the Awen yoga center, located at 30 Resurrección María de Azkue Street in San Sebastian. There, she teaches Hatha Yoga or classical yoga, but also offers other services: K-Stretch or posture hammocks and massages, among others. In this interview, Ana talks about the importance of yoga and her experience as an entrepreneur.

What is the Awen Center?
It is a center that seeks to restore human balance. We use different techniques. We offer Yoga, Hatha Yoga classes, K-Stretch (posture hammock), massage consultation, natural therapies, meditation classes, chanting mantras ... The most important thing for us is to find a balance of human beings, both internal and external.

How is the Awen Center different from other yoga centers?
We attach great importance to breathing, we don’t look for yoga as a contortionism or as something external, we work a lot on an emotional level ... We try to immerse the center in something internal, emotional. We connect the body with the mind, we do meditation techniques to concentrate on reflections, seeking human balance. It differs because we care a lot about the energy problem. Classes cannot be done in dark colors, we explain the importance of color. We are energy, we are not just the body, and then we try to connect the student with his energy, feel, observe how he was energetically and how he is when the class ends ... On the other hand, the center also has high-end natural cosmetics sales. They are all natural products from the Massada line.

What is yoga for you?
For me yoga is everything, my way of life, my philosophy of life. Anyway, it’s not just about doing a yoga class. I take it in my daily life, when I eat it, when I walk in the mountains ... It’s a way to connect with yourself, to get to know yourself, to observe how you are, how your emotions are ... it’s to suppress the ego. Now there is a lot of ego yoga, but with yoga you try to get to know yourself, to work with the ego with your flaws, with that existing spiritual ego.

How did you get into yoga?
I worked in a multinational, with a lot of stress, and I was a fan of aerobics. I signed up for yoga and started liking it. I started with weekend courses, started training, and after spending ten years as a student, I trained as a teacher and saw that the world I lived in looked like, everything was external, and I didn’t like it. I quit my job and set up my own yoga center.

What are the benefits of practicing yoga?
Physical, mental and emotional. As for the physical, back problems, low back pain ... We sit for many hours, bad postures in the office, standing still ... Emotional too, an attitude, when doing an asana, people don't realize it but suddenly they want to cry, and your it’s because you connect with an emotion. So I tell my students to express that emotion, to cry. Anxiety, anxiety, are installed in the chest and need to be opened. There are many attitudes to yoga to expand, to open the chest and heart, which serve to work on an emotional level. And on a mental level, anxiety, stress, a happier life ... Yoga gives you energy. When you get very tired in class, yoga gives you a lot of strength, more vitality ...

How can yoga help in these pandemic times?
People are very sad now, with a lot of anxiety, a lot of anxiety and it can help a lot through breathing, because yoga is the main breathing, learning to breathe. 99.9% of people who enter cannot breathe. We breathe a lot with the upper part of the chest, which is stress, and we have to breathe with the lower part, the abdomen. So now in a pandemic, people are taught to breathe, calm anxiety and stress, have a positive mindset, have positive thoughts, not to be invaded by all the negative energy around them. They are taught to stop, listen and read. "How am I? How do I feel? What do I want in my life?" sorry. The thoughts around you are negative, and you have to make an effort and turn that negative thinking into a positive one, and you will see how the energy around you changes, because thinking is energy. If you have negative thoughts, you are surrounded by negative energies and vice versa. How to change to positive ?, by automatically submitting the request. Now, more than ever, yoga is necessary. In these moments of so much suffering, anxiety and stress, we need to do our natural PCR, stop, connect and breathe (Stop, Connect and Breathe).

What are your classes like?
They are one and a half hour classes. We always start with awareness, 5 or 10 minutes of silence, breathing, practicing Pranayama, breathing techniques, to realize how you are today. There are attitudes for about three-quarters of an hour, asanas. There are weeks when we work our backs, other times our legs, and then we do a 20-minute relaxation, a visualization, so that all the work we do during the class is integrated into the relaxation and visualization. I recommend coming to class twice a week.

And in a pandemic?
We are doing classes with a mask, there are a maximum of 6 people in the group. I had to modernize myself technologically and I also teach online. Before we sang mantras, we opened the class with a prayer and now we don’t do that, we don’t do anything that breathes in our mouths. And we are with all the measures, with the hydroalcoholic gel, taking the temperature, each student must bring his mat, the room is ventilated, with lots of light ...

Do you have any future projects?
We’ve just launched our website, since we moved, in front of universities, and we plan to expand the opportunity for online classes because there are alumni who have left and want to continue to compose, and there are also outsiders who know me and want to follow me.

Why do people come to your center?
Most people, 90%, come because of pain, back pain, high anxiety, bad breath ... but mainly because of their posture, back, hernia, angina pectoris, stress ... After a month they are already noticing the change. they. The main yoga is breathing, something that is not given much importance in modern yoga. Awen attaches great importance to breathing. The main thing is: if you breathe calmly, you are calm. Heavy breathing, scattered intelligence.

What is the best and worst thing about starting a business?
The good thing is that when you start a business you are very excited. You are your own boss and you organize yourself. Being something with a vocation, you work with a lot more enthusiasm, you discover your own creativity, because you have to develop a lot, and you choose that way of life. You don’t have to work compulsorily, but because you like and enjoy what you do.
On the contrary, you have to think a lot about opening a business today, first of all because rents are very expensive and taxes are excessive, we have very little support. You have to work long hours to get the minimum wage, half of everything you get is taxed. Yoga for example, the summer months are not good, but you have to pay the same. And it costs a lot to get a student to come, but to leave very little. That’s why you have to take good care of the center, there’s a lot of competition. Now a lot of bad competition is coming out because pure yoga is being distorted, losing its essence. I do classical yoga, Hatha Yoga, for life, not the modern yoga that exists today, which is not yoga for me. For me, yoga is about connecting with your inner self, trying to connect with your being and disconnecting from the outside. The goal of yoga is not to achieve that attitude, but the work you do until you reach that attitude.

What advice would you give to a future entrepreneur?
Make a good study plan, have a lot of hope, a lot of strength. You have to be very brave, because there are many obstacles along the way, you have to think very carefully. And let them think about why they do it. In the case of yoga, if you do it for money, it doesn’t work.

www.awenyogasansebastian.com