Expats Fly Across the World to Study Yoga in Namma Chennai

CHENNAI:  Expats from across the world are coming over to Chennai to study yoga. From Uruguay to Singapore, people from different continents are taking time out of their corporate lives to spend three weeks in the city, learning how to rock a mean asana. With at least 10 such yoga centres that specialise in teaching yoga to expats spread across India, some centres take in batches with as many as 20 people — almost always coinciding with the Thanksgiving holidays.

But the course, stay and flight tickets cost a bomb — and one can find yoga classes easily in most countries. So why make the super long and expensive trip? Shoshana Treichel, a body builder turned yoga instructor from Alabama says it’s all about learning the art from its source. “My feeling is if you want to learn jiu jitsu, you go to Brazil, or for krav maga, you go to Israel,” says Shoshana. So for yoga one would have to visit India — and specifically Chennai — for the Krishnamacharya  method that she is studying at Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandir in Alwarpet.

Authenticity is a huge factor to these expats. “Back home there’s music playing in the background, it’s much more of a business and very commercial,” says German actress Ariana Bergner, who put her career on hold for a month to be here. “But here in Chennai, it’s so much more authentic,” she adds. Hardly any of the 19 other students in her class are Indian. The 26-year-old says that her only desi friend is an elderly spinster who happened to befriend her outside the Kapaleeswarar temple!

However, her weekly visits to her friend in Mylapore need to be put on hold now as she has her exams this week. That’s right. These certificate-level yoga courses are no joke. And Ariana tells us nervously that she’s been cramming all weekend long. And that’s after their rigorous practical sessions that start as early as 7.30am and go on till 6pm. “After breakfast we have many chanting sessions and it’s extremely intense. We need to wake up super early to make it on time for the classes,” she adds. Despite all this, the expat yogis-in-the-making manage to get a fair share of temple-hopping and sightseeing done as they soak in the architecture and culture of the city.

Wading through knee-deep water to make it to classes on time hasn’t made it easier. But conversing with these women over coffee, it’s apparent from their smiles that it’s all worth it.

The In-demand Yoga Stream

• There are web-guides for foreigners covering over 10 A-list centres for yoga across India, depending on the school of traditional practice they are keen on learning.
• Some like the aspirational Ramamani Iyengar Yoga Memorial Centre in Pune even have a waiting list that can take up to two years for a month-long course!
• Go a step further and we find that quite a few of these course curricula are in fact at the ‘international teacher level’. This means that students are already more than familiar with their surya namaskars learnt abroad, and the idea is to deepen their practice by learning it the traditional way.