Amanda Laura Helms Is Going Off-Script

Amanda Laura Helms arrives at Ole & Steen in Richmond looking like someone who belongs easily in soft light.

She is 28, Danish, petite, with searching blue eyes and tousled blonde hair that always looks as if it has just caught the wind. There is a physical strength to the way she carries herself, and I wonder if I am simply projecting something Viking onto her. She jokes on social media about being a “plant-based Viking”, and the description fits her looks well enough. But over the course of our conversation, I start to sense a different kind of strength from her.

Amanda has lived through a brutal illness that stripped her down physically and mentally. She has had to rebuild herself — slowly, through treatment, therapy, and a yoga practice that had to be relearnt along with everything else.

When we first met in Bali in 2020 on a teacher-training course where she was one of my trainees, she was just coming out of nearly a year of recovery. I remembered her mostly as being very strong and very flexible, which, in the yoga world, is often the first and least useful thing people notice.

What I did not know then was what it had taken for her to arrive on that mat.

“I wish I could say that I’m fully okay,” she says. “But I think the thoughts of self-doubt, and needing to control the outcome — they’re still there sometimes.”

She pauses, then adds: “It’s never nearly as bad as it was.”

First positions

Amanda’s story begins, improbably, not in London, where she now lives and teaches, but in Kuala Lumpur, where she grew up from the age of two and a half.

She was 14 when her mother first brought her to yoga. At the time, Amanda was moving deeper into performing arts: dance, acting, singing, school shows, musicals. Her posture was poor, she says; she had minor scoliosis, hyperextended knees, flat feet. Yoga, her mother thought, might help.

The class was hatha, but not the soft, scented version in most modern classes today. It was 90 minutes of stillness, sweat and silence in a packed Malaysian studio, no music, no distraction, just long holds and a teacher she still remembers vividly.

“He had been a monk, and he had escaped a journalism career in New York, I think,” she says. “He was physically really strong. He could do so many crazy things. But his voice was calm and strict at the same time. He didn’t say many things, but you could sense his aura was very peaceful and kind.”

She hated the class at first. But she kept going.

Partly, it was something she shared with her mother. Partly, it was the teacher. And partly, after a few months, it began to work. Her flexibility improved. Her core became stronger. She felt more capable in her body. As a teenager, that felt good.

“I felt quite badass doing it,” she says. “Not many people my age were doing this stuff.”

Soon, she moved from hatha to ashtanga. The discipline appealed to her. So did the difficulty. In ashtanga, there was an order to things, a sequence to master, a right way through. She became attached to the logic of it, especially the drop-back bridge, the standing descent backward into a bridge that she trained herself, alone, to do.

But yoga was never meant to be her profession.

The curtain falls

At 18, Amanda moved to Glasgow to study musical theatre at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. She wanted to act and sing. She loved the escape of it — the way a performer could inhabit another character without falsifying emotion. You did not pretend, exactly. You drew from yourself and placed that self somewhere else.

But in her final year, the thing that had once freed her began to close in on her.

“It dawned on me that I had one more year left, and from there, it was my profession,” she says. “That escape became so much pressure suddenly. It was no more an escape.”

The industry was hard, of course — training intense, expectations high. But Amanda is careful not to blame the profession entirely. “Ultimately, it was my own expectation of myself,” she says. “This perfectionism and needing to control the outcome, which you can’t.”

Her mental health deteriorated. So did her physical health. Her mother pulled her out before graduation and brought her home. Amanda was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa and depression. The months that followed were marked by therapy, medical monitoring and recovery that was far slower and less linear than any sequence she had learnt on a mat.

Yoga became one of the things she worked toward.

At first, she was not allowed to move freely. Her doctors set small milestones. If she became medically stable enough, she could do a little yoga. If she kept progressing, she could do more. She thought of becoming a yoga teacher, and her dream to attend teacher training in Bali became a kind of distant light — a reason to keep moving toward health.

“Yoga was my little nugget,” she says. “It was like, okay, I need to be strong and healthy enough to practise again. To do this movement again.”

This is the point in the conversation where it would be easy for me to steer her story toward a miraculous yoga breakthrough.

But that’s not Amanda’s story. When she recalls her recovery, she speaks about therapy, medication, and medical care openly. Yoga was not the only thing that helped her. But it was the thing she could carry forward.

“It was beyond just the therapy that I needed and the medication that I was taking,” she says. “Yoga was the other tool. And it’s a tool that I continue to use.”

Going off-script

As a performer, Amanda had spent years in relation to an audience. The body was trained, presented, judged. The voice was shaped by repertoire, technique and expectation. Even emotion had to be summoned on cue.

On the yoga mat, something else was possible.

“With yoga, it feels like a performance in the sense that there are asanas, there are postures, there are sequences,” she says. “But on the mat, nobody’s watching. You get to express these poses through your own energy and breath.”

For someone whose body had become a site of control and punishment, that distinction was important. Yoga did not require her to disappear from the body, or to perfect it for someone else. It simply asked her to tune in to what was there — without judgment or expectation.

“With vinyasa, you can be more compassionate,” she says. “You can just flow with the energy that you have.”

That compassion did not come naturally. In her ashtanga years, she says, she was more black-and-white. If there was a chaturanga in the sequence, you did it. If you skipped it, you failed. Recovery to her today means reaching for a different word: discernment.

“When you show up on the mat and you’re able to say, I’m not going to go so hard, I’m not going to do all the chaturangas today, I don’t have the energy for it — and accepting that and just going with the flow — that is amazing,” she says.

It is also the root of her teaching.

Today, Amanda is based in London, where she has built a career across yoga, barre and sculpt. Publicly, she describes herself as a 500-hour yoga teacher, and her work includes teaching at Equinox, Soho House and Retrofit London.

Before she was able to teach full-time, she spent four years juggling classes with restaurant work, including waitressing and management shifts. Until the end of last year, that meant late nights followed by early morning classes, sometimes 17-hour days, always on her feet.

Only recently had she been able to drop the restaurant work and focus fully on teaching. “I earn a bit less money overall,” she says, “but I’m less stressed and able to focus on my love for teaching.”

Her classes are strong. She knows this. She teaches in gyms, and she understands that many people who walk into those rooms want sweat, intensity, effort. She likes fitness herself. But what interests her is how to use that appetite for effort as an opening.

“It’s about how you can infiltrate the spirituality into these people’s heads,” she says with a laugh. “How to move, come home to your body, and feel how it is to be moving in a creative, different way.”

Creative vinyasa is where Amanda found her flow. In a traditional sequence, the next pose is already written. In creative sequencing, it is not. That unpredictability keeps students alert; they cannot drift onto their to-do lists or move entirely on autopilot.

But for Amanda, the deeper appeal is more personal.

“If it’s scripted already for me, and I know what the next step is, then I can very easily just ignore my own needs,” she says. “Every practice is different.”

“Scripted” is a loaded word here. For years, Amanda trained to work from scripts, to be seen through someone else’s words, someone else’s choreography, someone else’s score. Creative vinyasa allows her to go off-script, attentively. It gives her a structure loose enough to listen inside.

“When I’m practising alone, flowing requires that I listen so much to my own energy,” she says. “What do I need? Where does my body want to go now?”

She brings the same precision to music. Her playlists are intentionally designed for each class: beat for drive, mantra for vibration, lyrics for intention, silence where silence is needed. She does not understand teachers who simply borrow a playlist and press play.

“You have to be so intentional with the space you’re creating,” she says. “Putting a playlist together is not just, oh, pop song. It’s what order, at what minute.”

There is still a performer in her, but not in the old way. Teaching does not bring the same terror as auditioning. The voice, the projection, the ability to hold a room — all of that came from the stage.

But in yoga, the offering is hers. She is not being judged against someone else’s role. She is sharing something she has lived through.

“How I give people the practice is how I felt the effect of it myself,” she says.

No place like hjem

Her next project is called Hjem Studios. Hjem is Danish for home, and the name is the thesis: the body as the first and most important home a person will ever live in.

The online wellness membership and movement brand will include a library of vinyasa yoga and sculpt classes, a monthly bonus session and a community newsletter. Amanda is building it for the people she sees in London gyms: hybrid athletes, cardio fanatics, HIIT lovers, gym-goers who train hard but are missing recovery, mobility, and the mental side of movement.

In her own way, she is building it for anyone who has learnt to work against the body — and needs a way back.

“Don’t work against it,” she says. “Work with it. Make it feel better.”

As we leave the cafe, I think again of the young woman I met in Bali six years ago — strong, flexible, impressive in all the obvious ways.

I understand now how little those words captured. Amanda Laura Helms is still strong. But the strength that matters is no longer the ability to push through, hold longer, perform better, or master the next difficult shape.

It is the strength to listen before moving. To soften without disappearing. To choose a version of the practice her body needs that day.

For years, Amanda lived inside scripts: musical theatre scripts, strict ashtanga sequences, perfectionist rules, the harsh limits of illness. Yoga did not erase those histories. But it gave her a different way to move through them.

Not watched. Not judged. Not trapped inside a role.

Just breath, body, music, and the next unscripted step home.