MashaGorodilova

Masha arrived in Australia at 17 with very little English. Young, uprooted and angry, she wanted nothing to do with yoga.

“I thought, what yoga? I didn’t like practising,” she says. “I got really angry with the world, and I really didn’t like my parents for pushing me to live a life differently.”

Her yoga story had begun four years earlier in Siberia. After she developed kidney stones, her father looked beyond the lifelong medication proposed by doctors and introduced movement, breathing and sitting practices at home.

“For me, it was a game,” she remembers.

Years later, Masha understood what that practice had given her. “My life without yoga is miserable,” she realised. She returned to studying and practising, travelled the world and began building a career that now spans more than twenty-five years.

Its greatest reward has been community. “Call them close friends, call them my people that teach me things,” she says. She cannot imagine being without one now. It has become part of her.

The back room on Collins Street

Some of that community began in a small room behind a “fancy-ass gym” on Collins Street. Men arrived for personal training, cardio and weights, convinced fitness meant working harder and sweating more.

“I always had a lot of courage, very little English, very little knowledge, but I could see through people,” she says. Watching someone labour on a cross-trainer, she thought, “There’s so much more going on here.”

She took them into the back room, rolled out the mats and taught them yoga.

“They will come out different. Their posture is different, they’re smiling, they don’t look at the phone straight after they leave.”

That transformation showed her yoga was about more than postures. “It’s how you leave your yoga practice,” she says. “That’s where I thought, oh, there’s legs to this business.”

Selling happiness

Formal training in Byron Bay followed. “I didn’t even know you needed paperwork to teach back then.” Masha returned to Melbourne needing a real job.

Instead, she joined Hotbox on Chapel Street as heated practice was taking off. “We could not keep people out,” she remembers. “Just our queues, and all the classes were overbooked.”

There she met her future business partner, who proposed a studio centred on meditation. Masha wondered how they could market something invisible.

She asked him how you would sell meditation. “Do you meditate?” he asked. She did. “Are you happy?” She was. “You sell happiness.”

That idea became Happy Melon, which opened in Armadale in 2015, combining meditation with yoga, Pilates and fitness.

A few years as a mum

Then came motherhood. When her son Andre was born, Masha stepped back rather than become one of those “super mums” teaching with a child beside her. The pandemic arrived partway through, and her daughter Sofia was born in those years at home.

“I was really a mum for a few years, and it was a really special moment,” she says. “I didn’t have to rush anywhere. I could be with my kids and really learn to be a mum.”

Within

Within began during a walk through South Yarra. Masha noticed a lease sign outside an Aboriginal art gallery and looked through the window. “It was beautiful art hanging on the walls. That’s good feng shui, or whatever you call it.”

She made contact, and Within opened soon afterwards.

Not about me

Masha’s approach to teaching has been shaped by years of observation. Ashtanga remains central to her own practice and understanding of yoga: “like in Russia, ballet is at the core of all dance.” However, she is less interested in imposing a method than in reading the room and responding to the person in front of her.

“For me, teaching yoga is not about me,” she says. “My job is to stand here and witness what your body is going through, and then offer you support.”

Success is not measured by the most advanced posture someone achieves. “If you’re leaving tired, it’s probably a wrong class for you. If you’re leaving energised and awake and alert, it’s probably a good class for you.”

Sri Lanka

Her upcoming Sri Lankan retreat extends that philosophy beyond the studio: a small group, long morning practices, time to explore, and slower afternoons of meditation, guidance, space and silence.

India, she says, “chewed me up and spat me out.” Sri Lanka was different.

“I felt at ease. It was a beautiful, peaceful country. Beautiful people. Delicious food. I’m salivating thinking about it.”

She loves that it is “rustic” rather than polished. “It’s honest. People are there. People look at you. People welcome you.”

That might also describe what Masha has spent her teaching life creating: places where people are seen, welcomed and invited to leave feeling different from when they arrived.