Learning how to Navigate

This newsletter will feel a little different for many reasons. I am not someone who easily shares my inner world beyond the circle of those I deeply trust. I often feel like a burden when I do. A good friend of mine once said: “With four planets in the house of Capricorn and your South Node there, it makes sense you default into the logical mind; you need to welcome your Venus and North Node in Cancer.” So I did.

Even though I love numerology, Vedic astrology, Runes, and the divination traditions of my lineage; especially the pre-Roman, like the Etruscans; there are very few frameworks that can truly make sense of losing a friend.

So I decided to share something more raw here. Partly selfishly, to let it out of my chest. And partly in the hope that if you are going through something similar, you might feel less alone.

Learning how to navigate has become a recurring theme. Not just because it implies struggle or ordeal, but because it asks for skill, presence, and patience. I often picture myself on a vast sea: above the surface there is what can be seen and named, but below there is an abyss; vast, moving, sometimes inhabited by fragments of memory, echoes of the past, and things I cannot yet translate into words.

In yoga philosophy, the ocean is often used as a metaphor for the mind: always moving, sometimes calm, sometimes stormy. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali remind us that “Yoga is the settling of the fluctuations of the mind.” But grief makes those fluctuations unavoidable. It is not something to bypass; it is something to sit with, breathe through, and slowly learn to hold.

Since the departure of Luca, I have been learning to navigate my raft through this emotional sea.

Luca was not just a good friend. I used to call him “my other boyfriend.” He was one of my first teachers, a mentor, and a connection to my roots. And somehow, one of the places we always met; beyond everything else; was the mat.

We were fellow Rocketeers.

In Rocket Yoga, there is a certain spirit of rebellion; playful, strong, unfiltered. The “bad boys & girls of yoga,” as people sometimes jokingly call it, not because of disrespect, but because of the shared desire to break rigidity and find freedom through breath, strength, and flight. For us, it was never just a practice. It was a meeting point. A space where discipline met chaos, where laughter met effort, where we could simply be alive in our bodies.

There was always this Rome–Florence between us too; an exchange of humor, irony, and language that became its own kind of ritual. While speaking English, and our best attempt at Dutch, something else was always happening underneath.

If you are Italian, you can probably imagine it: Luca’s Tuscan sharpness, his sarcasm and self-irony, meeting my Roman exaggeration, crude and visceral language. I used to wait for those moments, or for our long voice messages, just to fall into that unnecessary but deeply alive regional chaos of expression and laughter.

Despite all of this playfulness, Luca was also an anchor. Whenever I felt alone, or needed to speak my inner world in my own language, he was there. And I was that for him too. He would pull tarot cards and say: “Elisa, the tarot is a mirror. It doesn’t tell you anything you don’t already know.” Today I picked mine too, and they were exactly that; a mirror.

In yogic understanding, this is not escape, but reflection. The practice is not to avoid what arises, but to witness it without turning away. Grief becomes a form of svadhyaya; self-study; and also bhakti, devotion to what has been loved and is now remembered.

I loved Luca like a big brother. I am still struggling with what comes up every day. I find myself listening to music, using his playlists as a way to feel close to him again; not to hold on, but to stay connected in a different form.

One of the teachings I keep returning to is anicca; impermanence. Nothing stays in the same form. Not joy, not pain, not people, not even love in its shape. But that does not mean absence. It changes shape. It becomes memory, breath, practice, presence.

I am grateful I told him what he meant to me while I still could. I did that thanks to a friend’s suggestion, and it remains something I hold close.

I lost Luca. I lost Federica when I was 29. I carry promises made to both of them, and I intend to live in a way that honors them.

If you want to remember him, on 21 June

10:00 – 11:00 | Yoga

11:00 – 12:00 | Sharing memories, gathering

Paleistuinen, Den Haag ('s-Gravenhage) (The Yoga Alley banner)

Drinks and cakes will be shared. You are very welcome to bring something too, as we don’t know how many beautiful souls will join us. This will not be a performance of grief, but a gathering of remembrance. A small space to honor a life that touched many. As we often say in practice: we do not “get over” things; we learn to breathe with them. And in that breathing, we stay connected.

In many traditions of yoga, the final teaching is not resolution, but integration. We do not return to who we were before; we learn how to carry what has changed us with more softness, more awareness, more breath.

If anything in this reaches you, may it be a reminder that you are not alone in navigating what feels too vast to name. We are all, in different ways, learning the same ocean.

Thank you for being here, for reading, for remembering, and for showing up with your presence; on the mat, and beyond it.

With love,

Elisa