Fellow Travellers

Sport, for me, is far more than a profession. It is a large part of my life, the thing I grew up inside, developed within and was shaped by as a person.

For more than 20 years I was a competitive swimmer, my main event the 200m butterfly. I took part in more than 30 international meets with the Greek national team, among them 4 European and 2 World Championships. I won 2 Greek Men's Championship titles and set a Panhellenic Junior Record.

Competing at that level gave me far more than medals. It taught me discipline, patience, persistence, cooperation and respect. Above all it taught me that progress does not come from one large step, but from the small effort we make every day.

For about 15 years now I have worked as a swimming coach. For 3 of them I was in Zakynthos as Head Coach of an entire squad, responsible at the same time for training and guiding other coaches.

Alongside that, my need to understand the human body more deeply led me to study Physiotherapy, and from there to Yoga. For the last 8 years or so I have taught Yoga and trained new teachers. My own training began in India and continued through different methods and specialisations, among them Yoga for musculoskeletal problems and the management of chronic pain. Today I hold a 500 hour Yoga Teacher Training diploma and I am still learning.

My experience in sport, in coaching, in physiotherapy and in Yoga led me to create Range+, my own methodology of supplementary training for athletes, and to the need for a space where all of that knowledge could be put into practice.

Somewhere along that road Aggeliki came into my life. She is the person I walk beside, in life and in what we want from our work. Together we created Noesi Elevated Wellness, a space in Peristeri, the place where I grew up, and today it is the dream we share.

We want Noesi to be more than a school of Yoga and exercise. We want it to be how we share what we know and what we have lived, how we help people come to know and to love their own bodies, and how we build a small community of people who choose to look after themselves and to keep growing.

Giving something back is inseparable from that for me. I founded the hiking group Sylvano Adventures, through which we organise outings that put a love of the mountain together with something useful. Through Hike 4 Change we walked for a cause, raising money against the kilometres we covered, and we have also run mountain clean-ups and raised money for animal shelters hit by wildfires.

For me, exercise, sport and wellbeing have real value when they can make somebody else's life a little better. In my own time you will usually find me on a mountain, or at a table with a board game or a chessboard.

Everything I do now has one aim behind it: to leave something good behind me. To help one person become a little better than they were yesterday. To give a young athlete some of the tools I wish I had been given when I started. That is my small stone in the wall.

Sport has been an inseparable part of my life since I was small. I started with rhythmic gymnastics and later took up figure skating. Looking for ways to develop my body and my performance, I found Yoga. From my first steps in it I understood that it was not simply one more tool for sport, but a new love that would stay with me.

For more than 8 years I have been a figure skating teacher, a sport I love particularly for the singular way it puts movement, freedom, music, expression and discipline together. In teaching children, what interests me most is not only that they develop their technique, but that they come to love movement, their own bodies and sport itself. Those years with children are one of the reasons Kids Yoga is such an important part of my work today.

In the summer of 2019 I travelled to Rishikesh in India, where I completed my first 200h Yoga training. Back in Greece I carried on with many more trainings and seminars in yoga, aerial, children's yoga and pilates.

In recent years I have worked in many schools and very different settings, teaching children and adults, running workshops and retreats, and taking part as a Yoga Teacher in sporting events, among them triathlons. Even now I travel in Greece and abroad looking for knowledge and gathering experience through seminars and trainings, because being a student is the most beautiful part of this journey.

Yoga, though, is not simply what I do for a living. It is inseparable from my life. I am a person with a great deal of energy, creativity and love for people. That is what I try to carry into my classes: to make a space where nobody feels surplus to it, and where each person can find their own way to move, to develop and to enjoy the practice.

And somewhere in the middle of all that another dream was born, together with Kostas: to make a space of our own. A space that would let us do what we love, keep learning, and share what we have gathered through years of experience and training. That is how Noesi Elevated Wellness came about.

For me Noesi is not simply a school. It is a shared dream and a space I want to put all my energy, my creativity and my love for Yoga and for people into. And above all, I want every person who comes through Noesi's door to feel that they belong.

Aerial came into my life in 2023, when I tried Aerial Yoga and Aerial Acrobatics for the first time. I understood from the start that it was not simply exercise, but a way to express myself, to push past my limits and to feel free.

After two years as a student I decided to take the next step and follow a teaching path of my own, qualifying in Aerial Yoga, Aerial Pilates and Aerial Kids Yoga, and I keep developing through Aerial Acrobatics seminars. Aerial Dance and Aerial Sling also hold a special place in my heart, where movement meets music and flow.

Today what I love most is sharing that experience with people in every class, making a space full of joy, movement and freedom. Because aerial does not only train the body. It teaches us to trust ourselves and to enjoy the journey.

When I am not in the air, I love the sea and travelling, especially when they come together with training, seminars and new experiences.