• Thank You Ecstatic Dance Berlin Community! You’re the Best!

    Thank you ecstatic dance Berlin community! What for? For saving my life! Literally. You are the best! Here is a list of a selected few I’m most grateful for! How ecstatic dance impacted my life It’s true, I have written about how ecstatic dance helped me deal with prolonged illness before.  Yet I feel that…

  • How to Embrace Challenges Using the Yopada Approach

    Let’s be honest. I shunned adversity like everybody else. Even despite a dozen years of parkour training and running this site called obstacle.love for 6 years I still didn’t embrace challenges in general. It’s only after I discovered the YoPaDa approach – a mix of yoga, parkour and (ecstatic or conscious) dance techniques – it…

  • YoPaDa or How the New Flow States Eliciting Method Came into Being

    For over six months I was very sick by my standards. I could not do much of anything anymore. So I had to come up with new ways of dealing with reality. While at it I combined yoga, parkour and ecstatic dance techniques to what amounts to the new “Dancing with the Walls” YoPaDa approach.…

  • How Sergey*, 39, Sedentary Programmer, Mastered Parkour in 10h

    Do you think you are too old, geeky or tall to train parkour? You err! Why? Hear me out! Today I want to tell you the story of how sedentary programmer Sergey learned parkour. He was 39 years old when I met him, father of two 1.93m tall and “underweight” according to his own words.…

  • How to Learn Parkour as a Weak Fat Adult Geek

    You often see frequently asked questions like “am I too old to train parkour, I’m [insert any adult age here]?”. Then you will also find the same question but instead of “old” they will ask “am I too fat (overweight), tall, weak” etc. etc. etc. The short answer to all those questions is a resounding…

  • How to Stay Calm When Facing Uncertainty

    When you lose your job, separate from your partner or simply get sick you may experience a lot of potential fears. I want to explain how to become fearless in times of uncertainty.

  • The Obstacle is the Path

    We live our life in transit always looking out for the imaginary point in the future when we will be happy. We overlook the actual place and time we are at. What would happen if we’d reversed that approach? Why not admit that the obstacle is the path?

  • Is Parkour Dangerous or Good for Your Health?

    Nobody would tell people how stupid and dangerous climbing mountains is these days. Yet just a century ago it was only done by a select few daredevils. Why do so many people think parkour is dangerous then? Is it really? Or rather good your health?

  • Learning Parkour Photography with Andy Day

    In case you have seen some good parkour/freerunning photos in the past you probably looked at Andy Day’s work. Andy has offered a parkour photography workshop in Berlin. That’s how I went about learning parkour photography.

  • Moving Meditation for Westerners

    The antidote to apathy and routine is parkour training. When you run, jump, climb you always are fully alert and focus on your surroundings. Like any kind of mindfulness you can expand your practice of parkour back to your daily life. Then it literally becomes moving meditation.