The Space In-Between:

On Being an Immigrant by Choice

There is something weird about being an immigrant by choice. Looking back, the pattern started almost three decades ago. In 1998, when I was 20 years old, my boyfriend (now my husband) and I decided to move to England. Sweden had joined the EU just three years prior, so we packed one suitcase each and got ready to go. At our local airport, my dad hugged me and said, "See you in a week!" We had bought a budget travel package that included a one-week hotel stay, back when boarding passes were still mailed to your house in the post. Freddie was heading to the University of Westminster, and I had landed a job as a barmaid near Liverpool Street. When my dad said that, I got so mad that I cried on the entire 50-minute flight to Stockholm.

When we arrived at Gatwick and the tour guide gathered everyone for the bus to the hotel, I asked Freddie for his return ticket. He handed it over, and I tore both of ours to pieces right then and there. I handed the scraps to the bewildered tour guide and said, "We won't be needing these." We ended up staying in London for close to six years before moving back home to Sweden, where we had two amazing kids.

Then in 2008, under much more "stable" adult conditions, we moved to the US as expats.

We settled in Evanston, right outside Chicago. For the first six weeks, all of our belongings were stuck in transit in Canada, so we laid towels out on the floor for the kids to sit on while they watched TV before bed. It was wild, but we made it work.

Then came the visa rollercoaster. We initially had a one-year visa with an extension pending. During the summer, while the lawyers were working on the paperwork, we went back home to Sweden and then spent a week visiting friends in France. That was when the letter arrived: our visa extension was declined. We panicked but that is a story for another day, though thankfully I am a full US citizen now!

We ended up living in the Chicago suburbs for eight years, and it is a city I hold so close to my heart. I love the people, the lake, the architecture, and the food. But eventually we got tired of the cold, so in 2016 we headed west and landed in Encinitas.

I honestly didn't think there were that many cultural differences between the US and Sweden until I moved here, let alone the cultural shifts within America itself as we moved from the Midwest to California. I am not really sure people understand it either unless you have traveled and lived it.

For those who know, we call it living in between.

After over 18 years in the US, I am no longer just a "Swede." I am the one who lives in America when I go "home" to Sweden, and when I am here, I am "the Swede". Marked by a different accent and maybe a slightly different viewpoint on things. You exist in this unique middle space, deeply rooted in both places. You belong to both places, and somehow not completely to either one.

Which brings me to today, and a truly wild feeling.

Today is the first day in my entire life that I am in the country where I live, not a country I am visiting, with zero family inside its borders.

My daughter decided to go back to Sweden last year for university, returning to the country where she was born and left when she was just a year and a half old. My son got a contract to coach junior hockey in Alberta, Canada, living out his dream. My husband is currently away on an international business trip.

It is such an uncanny feeling. I have a full life here, people I love, work I care about, places that feel familiar. And still, the quiet in the house feels different tonight.

Keep in mind, I am completely safe. I am going to work tomorrow, and I have a warm roof over my head. But as I sit here in the quiet, I am feeling literally all the feelings at once.

I am unbelievably proud of my kids. I miss them. I also feel this strange little sense of freedom, which catches me off guard. I don’t really know what to do with all of those feelings at once.

I had a call with my mom this week where she confessed that when I left for London as her youngest, she was literally drawing on the walls, couldn't stand being inside the quiet house, and would just go on long drives to clear her head. It is funny how almost 30 years later, across different oceans and generations, we end up sharing the exact same experience.

Twenty-eight years ago, I tore up those airplane tickets at Gatwick because I wanted to explore the world. We raised our kids across borders, showing them that the world is big, reachable, and full of possibilities. Now, my daughter is back where her story started, and my son is chasing his dream in the Canadian snow. They inherited that same restless, brave spirit.

Living in between means sitting in a quiet house in California with a full, messy heart. Holding immense pride right alongside the longing, the freedom, and the absolute weirdness of it all.

I might be the only one in this house tonight, but the life we built across continents is everywhere.

Unbecoming the Teacher.

I walked into a yoga class where nobody knew my name, nobody knew I teach, and nobody expected anything from me. I didn't realize how much I needed that.

Teaching in the wellness space is both a blessing and a strange kind of pressure. I've had students tell me years later that showing up to my classes kept them sane, anchored, sober, or alive during life events I knew absolutely nothing about at the time.

But there is another side to it too.

People often meet me as the teacher, the one with the plan. The one talking about breath, steadiness, nervous system regulation, strength, acceptance, and all the things we are supposed to remember when life gets hard.

And the truth is, I don't always live it perfectly.

My life can be pretty messy. I get overwhelmed. I second guess myself. Some days, if I'm completely honest, I feel like a fake.

Imposter syndrome is real when you spend your days teaching people tools you know work, while also knowing you don't always use them when you need them most.

The thing is, I know this stuff works. I live it every day. But knowing something and actually doing it when your life is a mess are two different things.

Maybe that's especially true right now because I'm 48 and my kids just moved out. Being a mom was a big part of my life for twenty years. Now that's changing, and I'm trying to figure out who I am when that's not the main thing anymore. There is freedom in it. There is also fear.

We recently moved from the coast. My entire time in California, I've lived and taught around Encinitas and Carlsbad, but now I live inland in Escondido. New town. Zero street credit.

So this weekend, I finally decided to step into a local spot downtown, a small studio.

And I get there and the teacher asked if I'd done yoga before.

Personally, I have a complicated relationship with that question.

Years ago, when I first moved to California, I was so excited to start practicing at the Ashtanga Yoga Center. When I walked in, the person sitting at the front desk was cold. She looked me up and down and bluntly asked, "Have you done yoga before?"

I ended up walking right back out the door.

It wasn't really the question itself. Teachers sometimes need to know about experience, especially in a class involving inversions. It was the feeling behind it. Like I needed to prove something before I had even put my mat down.

This time, at the small studio, I simply said yes.

I didn't tell her I teach. I just said yes and left it at that.

And honestly, that felt good.

When I went upstairs, the other students introduced themselves by name. They were warm and welcoming, but let's be real, stepping into a brand new room as the new person is always a little intimidating.

When I'm on the teaching end, I'm an extrovert. Put me at the front of a room and I'm completely fine. Put me on a mat in a place where I don't know anyone, and suddenly I become deeply introverted especially when the practice starts.

It doesn't matter how many years I've practiced or taught. Walking into a new studio with a teacher who has their own style means you are going to feel clueless for a minute. Their language is different, their sequence is different, their timing is different. You can know yoga well and still need time to understand how that particular teacher moves and communicates.

I tell my students this all the time. When you walk into a class with a new teacher, give it a minute to understand how they teach. Being on the student side of it reminded me how it feels when you don't know what's coming next.

As the class moved through inversion fundamentals, I started to settle in. I wasn't responsible for the class. I wasn't watching everyone else, thinking about pacing, music, transitions, or whether somebody looked uncomfortable. I didn't have to decide what came next or have the right words ready.

I could just practice.

And I think that was the part I needed most.

I spend a lot of my life in roles where I am expected to know what I'm doing. Teacher. Coach. Mom. The one with the plan. But right now, in a lot of ways, I don't have the plan. I'm trying to figure out what I want my work to look like, what I want this next part of my life to feel like, and who I am when my kids don't need me in the same way anymore.

Maybe that is why it felt so good to walk into a room where nobody knew anything about me. There was nothing to explain and nothing to live up to. For that hour and a half, I could just be there without all the usual roles attached.

No reputation. No answers to give. Just an anonymous student on a mat.

Who Is Catching You?

Most breathwork out there right now says the same thing.

Go harder. Breathe faster.

I don't have a problem with it. It works, and some of the people running those sessions are extraordinary. They have trained for years and know exactly how to manage the space. What it is, though, is controlled hyperventilation. You breathe fast enough for long enough that the carbon dioxide levels in your blood drop, and your state of consciousness shifts. That is simply what is happening.

A study published last year followed 61 experienced practitioners and found that the further their CO2 fell, the deeper they went. The states they reached were comparable to a moderate therapeutic dose of psilocybin. Ego dissolution. Mystical experience. That is what you are agreeing to when someone tells you to breathe faster.

Two rooms can both be called "breathwork" and have nothing in common. One is there to settle your system. The other is built to take you somewhere else. On a class schedule, they look identical. You only find out which one you walked into about fifteen minutes in.

But the thing is... Doing a lot of sessions does not mean you can run one.

I understand wanting to. You go feel something and it changes you, and you want to hand that to somebody else. But facilitating is a completely different job. When you are the student, you get to go all the way in. That is the point. When you are the facilitator, you are the one who has to stay out and the one who has to stay present, because you are watching twenty people at once. Nothing about being the student teaches you that.

Someone is going to tell me there is no evidence that people are being hurt in these rooms. That is true. There isn't any. There also isn't any data on how many people get hurt by unqualified yoga teachers, and I have been around long enough to have seen those shoulder injuries first hand. Nobody is counting. This industry expanded rapidly in about five years, and no one is keeping records.

There is also no license for this. No state board, nothing you can look up before you lie down. The most established standard is voluntary, written by a group of breathwork schools in 2003, asking for 400 hours of training over two years. Nobody is required to meet it.

I taught at Breathe Degrees in North County San Diego for four years, in a studio built around fast breathing and cold exposure. I was there when “we” opened the doors and managed the studio for the first 2 years. It was a significant period of my life, and I watched people build real strength, reset, and connect with themselves in ways I still think about. But the message never changed.

Go harder. Do more. You can do hard things. You are strong and resilient. You only grow in your discomfort.

I was good at it. I believed in it. But I have been guiding on my own for over five years now, and I don't teach that way anymore.

RhythmReset® is built on a different premise. We are not going hunting for your wounds or performance. We are updating the baseline you react from, and we do it at your pace. It can be emotional. People have experiences they did not see coming. But it happens because they chose it, not because I drove them there.

I read something recently that named what I had been circling for years. A coach tries to drive you toward a goal, treating the session like a race to the finish line. A guide assumes you already have the tools, walking next to you while you learn to hear yourself again. And I can be that coach. I know how to drive you toward the goal and keep you moving, and there are places where that is exactly what you need. But I am here to guide you.

That is true of the breathwork and it is true of the yoga. I am not setting the goal and I am not measuring you against it. There is nowhere you are supposed to arrive by the end of the hour. The practice on your mat belongs to you. I take what I need and leave the rest, and I ask you to do the same.

So before you book anything, anywhere, and not just with me, ask who they trained under. Ask how long they have been doing this and how many hours they have actually logged. Ask whether anyone watched them work before they were allowed to run a session on their own. And when you get there, look around and see whether they are alone in the building.

Experience is not a feeling and it is not a certificate. It is hours. It is the number of times you have been standing at the front when something you did not expect happened, and it adds up one session at a time. You cannot study your way around it and you cannot rush it. And hours on your own are not the same as hours next to someone. Working deeply with people is not a thing to learn alone. Call it a mentor, a trainer, a teacher, the word does not matter. What matters is that somebody further along was watching, correcting, and there when it got complicated.

So if someone cannot tell you how many hours they have, or who they were working alongside while they got them, that is your answer. And notice whether they tell you what to skip.

I don't take medical histories at the door. But every class, I say out loud that if you are pregnant, or if you have a medical condition and you are unsure, you should speak with your doctor about it first, skip the breath holds or just come another day.

There are real physiological reasons for that. It takes ten seconds to say. Plenty of facilitators still don't do it. Ask me. I will be glad you did.

If you teach, I would like to hear from you. And if you have been in a room that opened something up, good or hard, tell me that too.

A Love Letter to Encinitas

In 2016, we packed up our lives in Chicago and brought our kids out to the ocean air of Encinitas. Ten years prior, we had left Sweden when they were just toddlers. But from the moment we landed in North County, this town became our true California home.

Fast forward to right now: our daughter is back in Sweden studying at university, our son is moving to Canada as we speak to coach hockey, and for now, my husband and I are soaking up every moment in the town that helped raise our family.

Living here for a decade means watching how Encinitas has evolved. We've all felt the shift as skyrocketing commercial rents have made it almost impossible for local mom-and-pop yoga studios to survive. One by one, authentic community spaces get priced out, replaced by corporate chains with mass-produced schedules and scripted teachers.

If we want yoga to stay what it used to be, a genuine, unscripted sharing of the practice, we have to support independent spaces.

That is why choosing a co-op space at Oasis for my own independent classes was a deliberate choice. When you step onto the mat with me, you aren't walking into a corporate gym cycle. You are entering an intimate space built around human connection, continuous breath guidance, and actual rest for your mind.

As my kids launch into their own next chapters, I am so honored to launch this new chapter with the town that welcomed my family a decade ago.

• Come flow with me at Oasis this week:

  • Launch Date: Wednesday, September 2nd

  • Location: Oasis Encinitas

  • Reserve Your Mat.

Never Lose the Breath

We’ve all seen the Reels poking fun at yoga teachers who talk endlessly about their personal lives mid-pose. The comment section tells the whole story: when you step onto your mat, you came to quiet your brain, not to take in someone else's daily commentary.

There is a big difference between talking just to fill the room and providing continuous breath guidance.

My voice is strictly there as an anchor. I believe that your practice is yours and yours alone. We take what we need, and we leave the rest. The only thing I ask from my students is that they breathe.

From start to finish, I cue every single inhale and every single exhale alongside your movement. You don't have to guess when to transition, count your own breath, or manage your tempo. By holding that rhythm out loud, I take the mental load off your shoulders so your brain can finally stop working for an hour.

When you don't have to overthink the movement, your nervous system drops out of stress mode and into real recovery. You leave the room feeling lighter, grounded, and truly rested.

Come flow with me in North County

You can experience this fully-guided style with me throughout the week across North County, including my newest weekly class at Oasis Encinitas, launching Wednesday, September 2nd.

• Oasis Launch: Wednesday, September 2nd

• Location: Oasis Encinitas

• Visit: balancebymalin.com to secure your mat.