Spotlight on Mara Musso – Founder/Director & Yoga Teacher at Holistic View

I am immensely grateful to Laurence Nicholson for my interview. For those of you that don’t know him, Laurence Nicholson is a Global-Award Winning ‘Burnout Prevention Educator (Burnout Hacker)’ the CEO and founder of ‘burnout-hacker.com’, as well as the CEO and Founder of the ‘N Cubed Group‘, ‘My Better Life Coaching’, and ‘Exec Mental Health Solutions’, through which he works with both corporate clients and individuals, to improve and optimise mental health, cognitive performance and resilience, in order to realise measurable improvements in both business, and personal, productivity as well as decision making, but more importantly, understand how to prevent suffering the real trauma of burnout, and so protecting their families and lifestyles from its impacts.

Laurence has spent over 35 years working around the world, across personal and corporate environments, as both a consultant and leader, and since experiencing 2 significant burnouts himself some 10 years ago, neuroscience, human psychology and behavioural patterns have become his passion, and he now uses his travelling to study wide and diverse behaviours, and investigate the ‘how and why’ of our brain’s processes, and more importantly the impacts of stress and change on people, universally.

He also coaches others in how to educate people in Burnout Prevention, most recently in Tokyo, Japan just before the pandemic, with his Cognitive Masterclass, part of his Burnout Prevention Educator Certification.

Here’s a transcript of my interview which you can also watch on my YouTube channel here.

L: Welcome Mara, it is lovely to have you here today.

Can you start by sharing with us how you got into yoga and what inspired you to become a yoga teacher?

M: Yes! I took my very first yoga class in Italy when I was 18. I still remember it as if it was yesterday…. The teacher, a Belgian lady, started the class with a talk about how we never seem to live in the present moment: we either live in the past or in the future, which sums up beautifully Patanjali’s yoga teachings.

When I moved to the UK the following year, it took me a while to find a teacher I was comfortable with. I eventually found Barbara Davis who used to teach in a church hall in North Finchley. What struck me back then was that no matter the mood I was in when I went to the yoga class, I always came out of the class feeling more balanced: if I was feeling a little hyper or agitated before the class, it would calm me down and if I went in feeling a bit low, the class would raise my energy.

I was fascinated with yoga and wanted to learn more. A few years later I enrolled on a 2-year teacher training course with the BWY (the British Wheel of Yoga, which is the largest yoga organization in the UK). Foundation Courses did not exist back then. When I went for my interview, I told the tutor that I had no interest in becoming a yoga teacher and that I was only intending to do the course to learn more about yoga.

As part of the course was practical, we were encouraged to set up a yoga class quite early on during the training. I taught my very first yoga class in a community centre in Holborn in November 1994 and I loved it! I was immediately hooked and I haven’t stopped teaching since.

L: So, how did Holistic View come about?

M: I have been teaching yoga full time, as my only source of income since 1997, so running my own business is the norm for me.

When the pandemic hit, I lost all my work overnight. I was teaching up to 12 yoga classes a week in my home yoga studio in North London and all of that stopped on 20th March 2020 when the UK went into lockdown. I remember feeling quite numb in those early days. It felt surreal.

On social media yoga teachers were talking about how good Zoom was for teaching classes online. I had never even heard of Zoom. That was the beginning of my very steep learning curve.

With a friend, Prafulla, Holistic You, my online company, was born in the summer of 2020. There was still so much we didn’t know back then about the pandemic, but Holistic You was born out of, and because of the pandemic, and the need to offer a new way to practise yoga. I wanted to reach beyond yoga and this is why the word ‘holistic’ was used. I knew that I could reach more people if I offered more than just yoga. For this reason we have breathing & mindfulness classes, guided relaxation and chair/desk stretching. I have some students who attend regularly but who wouldn’t be able to attend a yoga class. For example the chair stretching classes are accessible to everyone including the elderly and people with reduced mobility and so are the breathing & mindfulness and the relaxation.

A new door opened when I started to offer classes to companies who were looking to help their employees to cope with the challenges of home working and the lockdown. I started teaching online yoga classes to some small companies and then in the new year I devised a 30-minute wellbeing session which has been a real hit. It combines targeted stretches with breathing and mindfulness and the feedback from the employees has been extraordinary with 100% saying they would recommend it and 100% saying that they would like their employer to offer our classes regularly. It is wonderful to see an employer who listens and is able to respond to their employees’ needs and support them. Sadly, I have also found that many employers rarely listen to their staff, which is a real shame.

A year later, I decided to give the company a new name, Holistic View, and a facelift with a brand new logo. The new logo feels very personal to me as it is based on a drawing that my partner did for me 20+ years ago and which encapsulates what Holistic View stands for, which is cultivating that inward-looking attitude, that turning of the senses inwards which is where the path of yoga and meditation begins.

L: I can see you are clearly passionate about what you do. So Tell me, what motivates you.

M: Yoga is my life. I have practised yoga for pretty much all of my adult life. What motivates me is seeing the smiles on people’s faces, it’s knowing that the holistic practices (not just yoga but also mindfulness, breathing, etc) can have a very profound effect on people. In some cases they can really turn people’s lives around. Of course you need to practise them regularly to see the results.

Over the years I have witnessed some amazing results in some of my students, which is very humbling.

L: Wow, so now you have me, and I’m sure the audience, intrigued! Can you tell me a little bit more about these amazing results?

M: Of course. I am happy to share a couple of those stories. I think the most incredible story is from a middle aged lady who used to attend my yoga classes almost 20 years ago. She had problems with her breathing, including reduced lungs capacity, asthma and was on a lot of medication when she started attending my classes. She found my classes challenging at first. Back then I was in my mid-30s and I used to teach strong Astanga-based classes, which are very dynamic practices characterised by sequences like the sun salutations and vinyasa. With the appropriate modifications and alternatives, the lady would turn up every week and participated in as much as she was able to. She became one of the regulars and then one day she approached me to tell me that she went to see her consultant and that he was very pleased, she was better and he was able to reduce her medication. She was clearly delighted about this. She persevered with her practice, in fact I think she started attending up to three yoga classes a week (not all with me). It’s only sometime later when I was able to have a proper conversation with her that she told me that her lungs’ capacity went from 50% to 90% and she was off her medication. She also told me that she knew it was thanks to the yoga because if she stopped doing yoga, even just for a couple of weeks, she could feel some of her breathing problems resurfacing. She knew she needed to keep up her practice to stay well.

More recently, a lady that I have never met in person, but who started to attend some of my classes on Zoom, including the Breathing & Mindfulness class which I teach every Wednesday evening, told me that she needed to have a hospital procedure but they couldn’t go ahead with it because her blood pressure was too high. This went on for several months. She kept going into hospital only to be turned back because her blood pressure was too high. The breathing practices that I teach on Wednesday evening, although they are very accessible to everyone, they have a powerful effect on the parasympathetic nervous system. I think people often dismiss them as just a bit of breathing, but they are indeed very effective and also easy to learn. So on her most recent visit to the hospital she told me that she was able to use one of the breathing techniques effectively to lower her blood pressure to such a degree that they were able to go ahead with the procedure. Isn’t that incredible? Of course the hospital staff wanted to know where she had learnt the technique and she told them ‘On Zoom!’.

L: What a fantastic story and validation for everything you do! I’m sure this inspires you to keep doing what you clearly love to do. So What next? What is your hope for the future?

M: My most immediate hope is that Holistic View becomes sustainable as a company, which means that its existence is not in jeopardy.

I am extremely lucky that I have some wonderful students who have been incredibly supportive and have been able to recommend me to their friends and family. Word of mouth is still the most effective form of advertisement, but with the expansion into online classes, I am increasing my online marketing to get my message out to a wider audience.

If I succeed in doing this, then I hope that the company can help foster a worldwide community of like-minded individuals. We need healing on so many levels: on a personal level but also on a larger scale. Our natural world needs healing. Yoga and meditation have always been very healing to the people that embrace them and integrate them into their lives. We can’t have healing outside if we don’t heal within. My wish is that Holistic View will play its little part in this.

L: That is a wonderful aim, and I am sure with your skills, experience and warm and embracing character, you will no doubt achieve this!…. So right now, how can people find you and get in touch?

M: My online classes can be booked through the Holistic View website: https//:holistic-view.co.uk and you can join regardless of where you are in the U.K. or abroad. While my small group yoga classes take place in my home studio in New Southgate in North London.

My email is mara@maramusso.com and my mobile is 07905509869.

L: Thanks Mara, this has been hugely insightful, and knowing the importance that activities like Yoga, meditation and stress management techniques play in the overall wellbeing of people, I certainly celebrate all you do.

I wish you all the success in reaching your goals. I know all those who pass through your classes will be so much better for it!

M: Thank you, Laurence. Namaste.

L: Namaste