The Second Ticket

I wasn’t looking for it. I didn’t choose it. I just — by accident, by chance — walked in one day. I liked it a lot. I got good basics. And since then, somehow, yoga was always in my life.

I think about that sometimes. How the things that stay with you longest are the ones you never saw coming.

I’m Polish, and I’ve just started teaching yoga — which means this stay at StartArt has been two things at once: a chance to practise, and a chance to learn how to teach better. When you move from practitioner to teacher, something shifts. Suddenly you’re responsible for someone else’s grounding, not just your own.

Yoga gives me happiness. It gives me grounding and a feeling of stability. It’s been in my life for so long that I struggle to imagine myself without it — not because I decided that’s who I am, but because it just kept showing up, and I kept saying yes.

“I think I haven’t chosen that — it just happened.”

I found StartArt on Workaway. I came as a volunteer — no particular plan, just open to it.

I loved it.

So this year I came back. For over a month. And I’m already planning to return next year.

Some places are like that. You arrive without a plan and find yourself choosing them again and again, even when the choosing takes effort — a flight from Poland, a month away from home. The choice doesn’t feel like a cost. It feels like returning to something that was already yours.

Morning yoga on the concentric-tile floor, the light flooding in from the open wall. Hikes through the forest. Swims in the river. Long dinners that drift into the evening with people who all, in their own way, showed up here by accident and decided to stay.

I didn’t choose yoga. It happened.

I didn’t plan to come back to StartArt. That happened too.

There are things in life that don’t arrive as decisions. They arrive as chances — small, easy to miss. A class you could have skipped. A listing you almost scrolled past.

You show up. You like it a lot.

And before you know it, you’re already planning your third visit.

StartArt Residency is open to yoga teachers, artists, and creatives of all kinds. Stays from 7 days in Vila Verde, 40 minutes from Porto, surrounded by the forests and rivers of northern Portugal.