Five years ago, Chayada Martjaroen made a trip through India. She made her way up North, stopping and moving and enjoying the sights and sounds of that multifarious country, until she arrived at Rishikesh, a town on the Ganges full of ashrams and yoga schools.
Chayada Martjaroen, owner of Make Friends Yoga.
“I’d never done yoga before, but once in Rishikesh, there were so many yoga centres there, I decided to give it a try,” says Chayada. “The town was full of yogis, yoga centres and instructors. The air was fresh and the water — contrary to what I’d heard about the Ganges — was so clear. Everyone seemed to go there to do yoga.”
Chayada came back impressed with the way yoga was practised in that Indian town: in an open-air setting and with the spiritual aspect woven into the physical exercise. Rishikesh, she learned, was reputed to be the world’s centre of yoga and its magic seemed to have rubbed off on her. Back in Bangkok she decided to open Make Friends Yoga, flew in Indian instructors from Rishikesh and later even built a statue of the god Shiva in her studio.
At the beginning, she thought of her new venture as just a small operation, with around a dozen clients. But it soon grew and she now runs six studios with more than 100 customers. Yoga is often regarded as a regime towards a shapely body and a way to lose weight, and also as a way of life dictated by our own breath. It is this distinctive appeal that Chayada’s school attempts to pass on.
Her connection with Rishikesh is so strong that she has also started a joint course with a school there to train Thai instructors under a strict Indian regime (vegetarian diet, praying and an intensive daily course). From Dec 5 to 7, Chayada will organise a Thailand Yoga Festival at her headquarters in Silom, with more than 60 classes during the three days and several Indian instructors and yogis flown in to lead the sessions.
“I believe that the kind of yoga practised in India is spiritual and healthy,” she says. “We can’t expect to bring the whole experience here, because in the city, a basic element like air quality isn’t half as good. Still, I believe that it’s best if we can learn from the masters and Rishikesh is where all the masters are.”
A bubbly, energetic woman, Chayada’s love of India is effusive. It probably runs in the family, too: As a child, her mother, a white-robed nun, took her to the subcontinent for the first time and today Chayada visits India, usually including Rishikesh, three for four times a year for both business and pleasure.
“Some Thais still look down on India and buy into the stereotype that it’s a messy, dirty country,” she says. “Part of that is true, but the rawness of India means it’s unpretentious. The beauty is breathtaking too when you know where to look. The Ganges, for instance, is often perceived as putrid, with corpses floating, but that’s unfair, because there are sections of the river that are so clear and so beautiful.
“Thailand inherited so much culture from India, we all know this. But we forgot it or pretend to forget it. That’s not the way to go.”
Yoga, too, is an ancient culture that the world has received from India. Today, yoga has become urban, cosmopolitan, even fashionable, with just a slight trace of the spirituality that accompanied its origin. It’s also been applied, augmented and adapted into various schools and disciplines — from hot yoga to flying yoga and children’s yoga — and while Chayada believes that there’s no right or wrong, that as long as it’s yoga it has benefits for practitioners, she still prefers the core idea of breath, mindfulness and the esoteric aspiration to use the practice as a way to communicate with higher beings.
“Today, 95% of my clients are women and it’s still believed that yoga is a way to lose weight and to attain a model-like body,” says Chayada, who also published Yoga Journal, a magazine dedicated to the practice licensed from the US. “It’s true, to an extent and it’s one of the reasons why people start doing yoga because it’s ‘fashionable’. Some people do yoga just because it’s a chance for them to wear nice fitness clothes.
“That’s alright with me, but it’s best to know the essence of it. Yoga doesn’t make you lose weight, but it makes your muscles firm — I now weigh more than five years ago, but I’m in better shape. Yoga keeps you strong physically and mentally and it’s because it heals you from the inside. That’s what I learned from India.”
