How to reclaim your power and your softness with Iolanda Trovatello

When we launched Wellbelle in June of this year, it felt like a new beginning and the start of something truly special. Iolanda Trovatello led our launch event with a beautiful yoga session that set the tone for everything we hoped to create - a welcoming space for women to connect not only to themselves but to each other.

Iolanda is a heart-led yoga teacher, somatic guide, and embodied movement facilitator whose work helps women reconnect with their bodies, their rhythm, and their truth. We sat down with her to hear her story, her reflections on new beginnings, and the wisdom she carries for women stepping into a new season of life.

What led you to practice yoga, and what inspired you to become a teacher?

My journey to yoga wasn’t a straight line, it was more like a slow unfolding. Movement had always been part of my life. I fell in love with Pilates in my early twenties, both mat and reformer and I dabbled in yoga here and there, but it never quite stuck. Something always felt missing. I was intuitive by nature, always sensing there was something deeper… but I wasn’t ready to go there yet.

For most of my adult life, I wore the badge of “high-functioning” - chasing, achieving, building. I’ve always been entrepreneurial, with a career that spanned from hospitality to sales, marketing, real estate and eventually co-owning a boutique agency with 20 staff alongside my husband. From the outside, it looked like success. But inside, I was completely disconnected. Burnt out. Living entirely in my head and using work to avoid the stillness I was terrified of.

In 2019, I took my first trip to Bali. I didn’t know it then, but that was the beginning of everything shifting. On a whim, I booked a private yoga session in the villa. I thought I was signing up for a bit of stretching and movement but the moment we dropped into stillness and I was guided to connect with my breath, something cracked open. Something ancient and true.

From that day, I started practising Ashtanga at home. Slowly, quietly, I began to feel again. Not just my body, but my grief, my exhaustion, my joy, my longing. All the things I’d buried beneath productivity and performance. Yoga became the place where I stopped trying to fix myself and started to meet myself. Gently. Honestly.

It wasn’t a decision I made overnight, but by 2022 I could no longer pretend I was in the right life. I left my husband, my home, and my career. I rented a one-bedroom apartment, sold the business, and gave myself permission to stop. To listen. I started going to yoga every day at a local studio, not to become a teacher, just to heal.

But as I went deeper into the practice, I couldn’t ignore the way it was reshaping me from the inside out. I enrolled in teacher training simply to understand what had cracked me wide open and somewhere along the way, the call to hold space for others became undeniable.

I never set out to become a yoga teacher but this practice gave me my life back. It brought me home to myself. If it could do that for me at 45, I knew I had to share it.

Now, I teach full-time and every time I guide someone into stillness, into breath, into their own remembering, I’m reminded of the power of this practice. Yoga, for me, wasn’t a new chapter. It was a rebirth.

Can you share how dance became part of your life, and what it means to you today?

I’ve always loved to dance. As a child, movement was my joy, my expression, my quiet rebellion. At eleven. the same year I got my period, my mum took me to a local dance studio. I remember wanting so deeply to do ballet, to feel graceful, poised, part of something beautiful. But I was quickly told I wasn’t the right fit - too big, not the right shape. That moment etched itself into me. Another layer of shame. Another seed of “not enough.”

Still, I joined a jazz Ballet class, and while I loved it, I carried the quiet ache of never feeling graceful enough, flexible enough, feminine enough.

Fast forward to 2022, the year everything changed. As I stepped away from a high-pressure, male-dominated world and into the sanctuary of my yoga practice, I began to question what it truly meant to be in my body. To reclaim the parts of me I’d hidden especially my feminine essence. I started listening to the parts of myself I’d silenced: my sensuality, my softness, my wildness, my truth.

And then as it always does, the invitation arrived. I found a local class called Embodied Dance. I had no idea what it was, but something deep in me whispered go. I booked in. I danced. And I wept. It wasn’t about steps or shapes. It was about surrender. About letting my body lead for once - not my mind, not my conditioning.

When I dance now, it feels like a conversation with my soul. A remembering. It’s where my power lives, not loud and forceful, but ancient and wise and deeply felt. Dance has become both my medicine and my liberation. A space where I am not performing but becoming.

Alongside yoga, dance is where I come home. To breath. To rhythm. To the woman I was always meant to be - free, fluid, and whole.

What does embracing the divine feminine mean to you, and how does it show up in your life or in your classes?

I grew up in a world where the feminine didn’t feel safe. Raised by a single mother, with an abusive, narcissistic father and strong Italian roots where patriarchy ruled the home, I learned early on to associate femininity with danger, silence, and shame. I carried a deep sense of worthlessness and for a long time, I didn't even realise how much that shaped me. As I moved into my teens and early adulthood, I began using my feminine energy as a way to feel loved, to feel seen, even when it meant abandoning my own boundaries. The feminine felt powerful, seductive, even beautiful… but also unsafe. Confusing. Costly.

Now, as I step into my Maga phase - this sacred time of menopause and deep remembering - embracing the Divine Feminine has become something entirely different. It's not something I perform or reach for. It's something I return to. To me, it means softening into the truth of who I am underneath the striving, the people-pleasing, the overachieving. It’s about honouring my body, my emotions, my intuition. It’s trusting the rhythm of my own seasons.

There was a time I lived entirely in my head - always planning, fixing, pushing forward. But it left me feeling fractured and disconnected. Through dance and yoga, I started to come back to myself. These practices invited me into my body in a way that felt sacred. Honest. Liberating. In dance, I found the wild. A space where I didn’t need to perform or hold it all together - I could just feel. Move from instinct. Express without explanation. That raw, rhythmic movement connected me to something ancient and wise within - the part of me that knows when to rest, when to rise, when to be still.

Yoga offered me a container to hold it all. Especially in feminine, fluid flows and yin practices, I learned that strength doesn’t have to be hard or forceful. It can be surrendered. It can be soft and fierce at the same time. Breath by breath, I began honouring my sensitivity, my sensuality, my sacred inner knowing - all the parts I once pushed away.

So, for me, the Divine Feminine is presence. It’s deep listening. It’s permission to move in spirals, not straight lines. It shows up in the way I guide my classes, not with rigid structure, but with reverence. I create space for women to feel, to unfurl, to come home to themselves. Not as a performance. But as a remembrance.

What are some meaningful life lessons you’ve learned that you’d love to share with the Wellbelle community?

One of the most powerful lessons I’ve learned is that the body holds wisdom the mind can’t always access. For so long, I tried to think my way through life - through healing, through identity, through purpose. But it wasn’t until I began to truly listen to my body through practices like dance and yoga that I started to feel what was real for me.

Another lesson has been about honouring my cycles - not just physically, but emotionally and energetically. I’ve learned that I don’t need to be “on” all the time. There is deep power in rest, in stillness, in softness. The Divine Feminine has taught me that slowing down isn’t falling behind, it’s actually where we catch up with ourselves.

And maybe the biggest lesson of all is that your truth lives in your felt sense, not in the expectations placed on you, or the roles you think you should play. When I stopped trying to be palatable or polished and started moving from a place of presence and embodiment, life felt more aligned. More alive. More mine.

So I guess I’d say: trust your body. Trust your rhythm. Let yourself be led by something deeper than logic. And remember, you are allowed to be soft and strong. You are allowed to rewrite the story.

What’s one piece of advice or loving reminder you’d offer to the women reading this as they step into a new season of life?

I would gently remind them: you don’t have to force your becoming. You are meant to unfold. Just like the seasons, you are designed to shift, soften, and rise in your own time. There’s so much pressure to have it all figured out, to move fast, to be certain. But what I’ve learned especially through embodied dance and yoga, is that there’s deep wisdom in the in-between spaces. In the quiet. In the questions. In the slow, sacred return to self.

So, if you’re stepping into a new season, let it be just that, a season. Let it hold its own flavour, its own lessons, its own rhythm. You don’t need to carry everything from the last chapter with you. You can lay things down. You can change your mind. You can become someone softer, wilder, more you.

Trust that your body knows the way. Trust that your becoming is enough, even when it feels uncertain, because this is where your magic lives: not in perfection, but in presence.

Lastly, is there a book or quote that has deeply impacted your perspective on movement, life, or feminine power?

There are a few quotes that have really stayed with me, not just as words, but as invitations back to myself. One of them is: “Authenticity doesn’t guarantee that everyone will like you. It guarantees you will like you.” And another that struck a deep chord: “Anything you lose by speaking your truth isn’t a loss - it’s an alignment.”

I’m not even sure where those words originally came from, but they landed in my body in the way truth often does - quietly, and all at once. They reminded me that living in integrity with yourself is the deepest form of power.

In movement, especially through dance and yoga, I’ve learned that truth isn’t always tidy. It’s felt. It rises up through the spine, the hips, the breath. These practices have taught me that being fully in your body is an act of remembering who you are and choosing her, again and again, even when it’s uncomfortable.

So whether it’s in life or on the mat, I come back to this: it’s not about being liked. It’s about being true. And when you live from that place, something sacred clicks into place - a quiet kind of power that doesn’t need to prove anything. It just is.

About Iolanda

Iolanda is a heart-led yoga teacher, somatic guide, and soulful space holder offering intentional, embodied feminine practices that support deep self-connection, emotional healing, and spiritual integration. Her approach is grounded in the understanding that the body holds our stories and through movement, breath, and stillness, we can gently return to wholeness.

Her offerings are especially supportive for those moving through transition, grief, or disconnection - anyone longing to feel more at home in themselves. With warmth, empathy, and lightness, she walks beside her students to help them remember their light, reclaim their wholeness, and live from a grounded, embodied truth.

Follow Iolanda on Instagram @iolandina