In a world that often moves fast and looks outward, Original Feelings is a space interested in slowing down and looking within. Founder Karlie Riedl tells us more about this holistic well-being studio in Berlin, offering practices in a pleasant and calming atmosphere.
What first inspired you to create Original Feelings, and what feelings, sensations or truths were you hoping to offer others that perhaps you were seeking yourself?
Original Feelings was born from a very personal reckoning. There came a point in my life when I realized I had become extraordinarily good at performing – at moving efficiently through the world while feeling almost nothing of it. I was productive, present on paper, and deeply disconnected. What I was searching for wasn't happiness, exactly. It was something more honest than that – the raw, unfiltered experience of being alive in a body, in a moment, without the noise. I began to understand that many people around me were living in that same quiet numbness. Original Feelings became my answer to that – a space dedicated not to manufactured bliss, but to the rediscovery of what is real, what is yours, what was always there beneath everything you were told to feel.
The name Original Feelings feels like an invitation to return to something essential. Could you tell us more about your different services – the whole palette of feelings?
The name was always the compass. Everything we offer at Original Feelings is designed to gently dissolve the layers that accumulate between a person and themselves. Our yoga classes move across a full spectrum – from dynamic, breath-led flows that ask you to find strength and presence simultaneously, to deeply restorative practices that teach the radical art of release. We offer bodywork and holistic treatments that honour the body as a site of memory and intelligence, not merely a vehicle. And then there are our retreats – immersive experiences that take people out of the ordinary long enough for the extraordinary to surface. Each offering is different in form, but unified in intention: to return you to yourself.
In a city that rarely stands still, what does it mean to create a space devoted to remembering what it feels like to slow down, breathe deeply, and connect with what truly matters?
A city moves at a pace that can feel non-negotiable – as though stillness is a luxury, or even a failure. Creating Original Feelings in that context felt like an act of quiet resistance. What we're offering isn't an escape from life; it's a more deliberate way of inhabiting it. When someone steps through our door, we want the shift to be immediate – in the quality of the light, the texture of the air, the rhythm of how people speak to one another. Slowing down, I've come to believe, is not passive. It takes enormous courage to stop, to breathe, to feel. We try to make that courage feel possible, even welcome.
Yoga teaches us to pay attention to what is already there. How has this philosophy influenced the way you think about community, sustainability, and everyday living?
Profoundly and irreversibly. Yoga taught me that the most nourishing things are rarely the most complicated – and that attention itself is a form of care. That understanding has shaped every choice we make at Original Feelings: how we source, how we speak, how we build relationships with our community. We don't chase newness for its own sake. We ask instead what is already here, what is already working, what has been overlooked. Sustainability, in that sense, isn't only an environmental principle – it's a philosophy of not taking more than you need, of tending what you have. And community, to me, means showing up consistently, with honesty. Less performance, more presence.
Are there any small rituals – before class, after class, or in daily life – that you believe have the power to gently transform the way we move through the world?
Deeply, yes. I am a devoted believer in the ordinary sacred. The ritual of making tea slowly and drinking it without looking at a screen. The practice of pausing at a threshold – a doorway, the beginning of a breath, the start of a meal – and asking: am I here?
These small acts accumulate. They are, I think, how transformation actually happens – not in grand gestures, but in the quiet decisions we make about how much presence we're willing to bring.
When you imagine someone leaving Original Feelings after a class, treatment or retreat, what do you hope they carry home with them – not in their hands, but in their heart?
A sense of remembering. Not learning something new, but recognising something they had perhaps always known and simply lost access to. I hope they feel the particular quietness that comes after the nervous system has been genuinely held – that soft, grounded aliveness. I hope they feel, even briefly, less at war with themselves. And I hope they carry some tenderness – toward their body, their emotions, the ordinary texture of their day. If someone walks out of here feeling just a little more at home inside themselves, then everything we do has served its purpose.
