Yoga Festival: I prefer to feel my own body

Nobody misses the studio comfort here: VITAL employee Michaela Rose looked over the edge of the mat at the Berlin Yoga Festival - and celebrated a colorful yoga party with a hippie feeling.

An ant marches over my mat. I balance on two hands in the crow and look after her. Do not land on her! That would be stupid for the ant - and for my karma. I am practicing Jivamukti Yoga under blue sky. And Jivamuktis are committed animal rights activists. So I keep fighting for my balance. Not easy, because my mat is on a grassy slope. In this imbalance, the asanas feel quite oblique. But for this open-air class I like to skip comfort. After all, no forest and meadow teacher teaches here, but the New Yorker Dechen Thurman, brother of Hollywood star Uma Thurman. The Majorca Towel Syndrome is even rife among yogis: there were already 200 mats on the 200 level squares when I arrived. Rush Hour at the Berlin Yoga Festival. Anyway, Dechen Thurman walks through the crowd and instructs us anyway by microphone.

Without it, it would not work. Except for me 4999 yogis romp in the Kladow Cultural Park. Sounds like mass event, but feels better. Everything is peaceful and relaxed, I just have to queue in front of the Dixi-Klos. Three Days of Yoga Nonstop: If you want, you can do yoga from the morning meditation at six o'clock to the moonshine class at midnight, take a bath in the Wannsee lake breaks and camp in the huge park.

I do not want. I create a relaxed program from 68 workshops, lectures and concerts by more than 50 yoga greats from Europe, the USA and India. And let me drive otherwise. Stay where it seems interesting. Go, if I have enough. That's the way everybody does it. Like an anthill, just colorful.

At the bazaar I bargain with an Indian for the price of a ring, buy self-adhesive glitter stones for the forehead and fall in love with a Shakti shirt. Try on in the middle of the hustle and bustle - Laisierfaire for the advanced. I get a henna tattoo on my hand. So I sit at the Indian fire ceremony incense fragranced in the grass - somewhere else kokelt something else - and sing in the evening together with hundreds of Sanskrit mantras at the Kirtan concert. Drink cup-wise yogi tea and talk with strangers and friends between the vegetarian food stalls. Enjoy an Indian dish whose name I can not remember. Little India in Berlin-Kladow.

But the stars of the yoga festival are for me the passing people. A dreadlock blonde rings her anklet every step of the way. A washboard belly Asian struts past with cowboy hat and shirtless body. Many Indians wear turban. Everywhere people in yoga clothes, many yoga teachers, even more families and raging children of all ages. Now and then an old hippie. A great yoga family. Nowhere else do you see so many people with individual charisma - and nowhere do you get into conversation with someone so fast. Mat on mat chats it easily. A woman, for the first time here, raves about the poignant mood, wants to come back in 2011. Me too. For me, the festival is a small yoga cosmos that transcends the normal world.

It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between devotion and humbug. But spirituality and skepticism are not mutually exclusive: at last year's yoga festival, I sat in a crowd with my eyes closed, listening to an Indian. He said he thoughtfully put his hand on each of our heads. In addition, we should please from now on just pay homage to his thoughts. Grumbling raised my own ideas objection, it rather pays homage to the right of self-determination. The self-proclaimed guru wandered through the crowd, blinking and watching as he pounded a few listeners on the head. Who felt my touch? He asked afterwards. I could barely believe my eyes: Many raised their hands around me. Oops, had I missed the abbreviation of enlightenment?

I prefer to feel my own body. In the legendary Kundalini gong meditation, which allegedly shoots one in the universe. Hundreds of yogis mat lie on mat in the festival tent, out on the meadows. I am in the middle of it. Next to me strange feet. Antshaufen just. For minutes, the sound carpet of giant gongs swells. Suddenly a roaring sound rushes through my body. Like a wave of surf, she jiggles me, takes my breath away. Full yoga- droning! The gongs fade, I land again on the ground. Strange, my legs are not quite on the floor. I still hover a bit. Good for my karma - I could not hurt an ant now.