Hello world!

Welcome to the beginning of one of my dreams I’ve been working on. I’m Michelle Buguñá a Chilean wanderlust and yoga teacher. A small intro for you to know me, I’ve been traveling since I can remember, I come from a family that loves to explore our beautiful planet. That is why one of my biggest passions is to get to know new places and new people, exploring cultures and then trying to take the best out of everything I see, is one of my biggest pleasures in life.

On the other hand, my mom is a yoga teacher so I’ve been practicing yoga since I was a little girl and when I grew up, I kept coming back to yoga from time to time, until after an important break-up and the death of a loved one after my last semester of university I did in Australia. I moved from Australia to Thailand, where I did an internship in a digital marketing agency.

There I was living alone in Bangkok and determined to make the most of my life. I sheltered in yoga and started to learn how to meditate on my own. A series of events happened (it was an amazing time, but I need another post for that adventure!), one of them led me to go to my first Vipassana course. In a few words, Vipassana is a meditation technique that is taught all over the world in 10 days of silence (also here I need a whole post for this). This was a turning point in my life, I started to follow a vegetarian lifestyle, started to meditate much more and I have been practicing yoga all along ever since (with some breaks here and there, it is normal!).

I traveled through South East Asia after my internship in Bangkok, going to Vietnam, the north of Thailand, Burma and Indonesia, all as a solo traveler, one of the highlights of my life, no doubt. In Bali I started to learn how to surf, which was also a very important milestone in my life, because surfing has been also something that has given me so much, not only as a sport, but in a spiritual way as well.

I went back to Chile, I entered the corporate world, working for a big IT company (the Big Blue, if you are in the industry, you know ;)). It was way too stressful, so I started to deepen my spiritual journey and entered my first yoga teacher training in Chile a 750 hours that I finished, but didn’t do the exam for it, so didn’t certify it (two broken ribs and Covid had a lot to do with this). I switched industries in my professional life, while I was studying yoga. My new job got me to travel a lot and I got transferred to Liechtenstein and Italy.

It was in Italy that I finally did and certified my 200 hours yoga teacher training, I got an amazing luck to stumble upon an incredibly good school (Yoga Milan, I cannot stress enough how good this school is (it teaches in Italian though), but I highly recommend it). While in Italy I was traveling half of the time and while I was enjoying that side of my job, it was tremendously unorganized which caused a tough burnout that ended up being the blessing that gave me the courage to leave my corporate and stable job to go out there and continue to travel the world and finally go back to India (I had been there in 2012), where I had a dear friend from University (Australia). On the very same day I officially communicated I was leaving my job, I received the news that my friend had passed away. I cannot explain with words how I felt, but somehow I knew it was a huge sign that I was doing the right thing by following my dreams.

I started such an adventure after leaving that corporate job that was literally making me sick. I went to Portugal to a magical retreat, I went to the mountains in Italy, to Hungary, to Dubai, to Uganda, to Salento in the south of Italy. It was already magical, but it was just the beginning, I ended up going to LA to go to Burning Man for the first time, then Big Island, Hawaii, San Diego and back to Chile to see my friends and family. Then I went for a last goodbye to Italy and from there (where it all started), I went to India.

India felt so weird knowing that the person I wanted to see the most, was not in this world anymore. In any case, I spent a few days in New Delhi and then went to Rishikesh, where I did my third Yoga Teacher Training, now for 300 hours. Here I started to realize I needed to share everything I was learning, I feel I have so much to teach, so much to share. And this is not only from formal trainings, but from my personal experiences, I feel the need to share all this now. I went to a wedding in Bangalore and then to Goa, where somehow all this that I have lived up to now, started to get a clearer shape, I made the decision and that’s how it started to be real. Yogini Nomad was officially on the making!

If you made it up to here, I really appreciate you took all this time to read my story, I really hope we can meet in one of Yogini Nomad’s retreats around the world (That is why I’m leaving a hint here for a 5% discount on your next retreat with me, write me a DM on Instagram or Facebook with the name of my friend from India that passed away: Raghav -valid for only one retreat with Yogini Nomad-). I’m dedicating all of me to make these trips so magical and transforming so that others can see the beauty of life with its ups and downs from their own beautiful and shiny light. We all have it inside, sometimes we just need some help to light it up!