There is hot yoga, goat yoga, beach yoga, hatha yoga, laughing yoga and Iyengar yoga. Studios collaborate with corporations. Community classes are held in fitness centres. During the Covid-19 pandemic, participation surged, mirroring global trends.

But while class styles are diverse, some teachers say the students are not.

Tiffany Paynter, cofounder of wellness and yoga hub Treehouse Bermuda, on Trott Road, Hamilton, said when she started taking yoga classes 20 years ago, there were very few people in the class who looked like her.

Most of her fellow students were thin, young, white women.

There were few black students, and none featured in marketing materials.

She opened Treehouse Bermuda two years ago with Caitlyn Conyers, hoping to appeal to a wider range of students.

“How could the yoga market in Bermuda be saturated when we haven’t yet scratched the surface of 70 percent of the population who are people of colour,” she said. “We are just getting started.”

On the ground floor of Treehouse, there is a bulletin board carrying flyers for different classes. Paynter is proud of the variety of people in the advertisements.

When Robin Holder started taking classes more than 10 years ago, he was often the only male in the class, even when taking yoga classes overseas.

He teaches yoga at the Courthouse Gym, does some work for big corporations and also teaches “karma” classes — free classes to help the community — at fitness studio Shamana Circle.

Holder believes things are getting better.

“I have seen more men coming to classes,” he said. “Although it is not better to a huge degree — there are still more women in yoga classes than men.”

He believed the Bermuda yoga market is far from being saturated.

“The industry here is not like it is in Toronto — the yoga capital of the world,” he said.

“There is no yoga studio on every corner. The different studios attract their own clients. Some of the clients go to different studios. There are opportunities for more yoga studios to come online.”

Holder thought that as Bermuda’s older population continues to grow, more local yoga studios will focus on this demographic.

“People over 65 can definitely benefit from yoga,” he said. “Yoga has an enduring appeal. It transcends fitness trends.”

One issue that has dogged local studios is spirituality. When yoga was just heating up on the island, some saw yoga and meditation and its connections to Hinduism as a contradiction to Christianity.

One anonymous person remembered how when he suggested doing meditation to clear his mind, his mother was horrified stating that clearing the mind would let the devil in.

Yoga originated in ancient India more than 5,000 years ago as a spiritual, meditative practice to unite the body and mind.

Today, many modern yoga studios feature artwork of elephants, a symbol deeply rooted in Hinduism and Indian culture, representing spirituality and wisdom.

Paynter has seen some studios in Bermuda throwing out their elephants and changing the Indian names of poses to English ones in an effort to not offend anyone on religious grounds.

Joanne Wohlmuth, a veteran yoga teacher and co-owner of the Yoga Centre on Victoria Street, has written extensively about yoga and spirituality.

“That has happened in Western yoga,” Wohlmuth said. “It has happened because some people do not understand how to make the connection between Christianity, yoga, spirituality and religion. I am a Christian.”

She said by the time spirituality is sanitised out of yoga, all that is left is a bunch of poses and stretches.

“That is not what our centre is doing,” she said. “That is not what we are interested in.”

During the Covid-19 pandemic, yoga saw a meteoric rise in popularity. As social-distancing measures ended, the trend reversed, causing some studios to close.

Wohlmuth said the studios that survived were those that offered more in-depth teaching of yoga.

This article was written by Jessie Moniz Hardy, edited by Yen Feng, and first appeared on The Royal Gazette on February 21, 2026.

When he rises to greet me in the kitchen of his Sixth Avenue home, he is wearing a fitted black V-neck T-shirt and loose linen trousers. His hair is cropped short, flecked with silver. His body is compact and muscular, the body of a former boxer — broad shoulders, thick in the torso, built more for a ring than a restaurant. There is a roughness to him, a raw masculinity that feels at odds with the restrained refinement of the plates he serves at his restaurants.

The 57-year-old is best known as the Belgian-born chef behind Saint Pierre, one of Singapore’s longest-running fine-dining institutions, and Shoukouwa, an omakase-style Japanese restaurant. Both hold two Michelin stars.

Over the years he has expanded into television, books and other hospitality ventures, building an enviable reputation that blends classical French technique with Japanese precision and a deep engagement with Asian ingredients.

When he describes himself, however, the image he portrays is not quite the polished portrait you might expect.

“For the longest time,” he says with a laugh, gesturing down his arms and miming a cigarette and a drink. “I used to be like, tattoos everywhere — Harley Davidson, smoking cigars, drinking whiskey. That kind of chef.” He breaks into a broad grin, his eyes bright with mischief.

He says it half-jokingly, but it reflects the real-world intensity of professional kitchens — particularly the generation in which he came up, where being tough was often synonymous with authority.

Many chefs still see it that way. Stroobant does not. What he values today is something far less showy and harder to sustain.

“Reliability is your secret weapon,” he tells me early in our conversation, describing how yoga has changed his outlook since he started practising almost 20 years ago.

In Stroobant’s world, reliability has little to do with talent and everything to do with showing up — whether in the kitchen or on the mat.

That change did not happen overnight.

It began, unexpectedly, with music.

From the ring to the mat

He had always been physical. Boxing and martial arts were already something he did regularly. One day, in his 30s, while training for a white-collar boxing competition at a gym, Stroobant heard music from another room. Through the window he could see a yoga class in progress.

“There were guys doing yoga on the other side of the window with the music quite strong,” he says. “And I really enjoyed the music. I thought, I have to try a yoga class.”

In his first class, there was no spiritual revelation.

What was revealed was that he could barely touch his knees.

He was told he should try hot yoga. So he did.

At a yoga studio nearby, he began practising five days a week, sometimes more, fitting classes into the awkward split shifts of restaurant life. He loved the sweat, the grit, the familiar feeling of pushing himself to the edge. At first, that was enough. Yoga, in those early years of his practice, was purely physical. It was simply another demanding thing the body could do.

That soon changed — first, through Carlos Pomeda, a Sanskrit and religious studies scholar whose teachings helped Stroobant decode the shapes he was making on the mat. Pomeda taught him not just the poses, but the philosophy behind them.

“He made me understand why I was doing those asanas,” Stroobant says. “That flipped everything.”

Then came Andrei Ram, a world-renowned teacher whom he still refers to as “my real teacher”. Stroobant describes walking into a lift and seeing a man standing beside him. “That man was beautiful,” he says. “I couldn’t express it. There was something stunning about him.”

That man turned out to be the teacher of the class he was about to take.

Ram, who was ordained by Sri Dharma Mittra, offered something Stroobant had not yet been able to piece together: the physical practice, the philosophy and, crucially, meditation.

He describes an early meditation lesson with Ram. Why, Ram asked him, could he not simply sit in peace? Because a mind burdened by unfinished tasks, neglected responsibilities, and unexamined conduct cannot settle easily, Ram said.

For Stroobant, that flipped another switch: meditation was not just about posture or technique, but about the conditions that make stillness possible.

A retreat in Colombia with Ram followed in 2013, and with it, a vow.

If he wanted to teach that lineage seriously, Ram told him, he would need to commit to practice in the way a priest commits to a calling. So he did.

“My vow was to practise daily, whatever happens, going back home at 4am, a little bit tipsy because of my work, whatever happens,” he says. “I made a vow, and I have never, ever missed a single day of practice for 13 years.”

Mise en mat

The cliché of chef as tyrant still hangs over fine dining: the shouting, the humiliation, the relentless pressure in the name of upholding standards, popularised by television shows like Hell’s Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares.

Stroobant, who began his culinary career at age 16, and opened his first restaurant at 23, in Liege, Belgium, knows that world intimately.

“I grew up with this,” he says. “It’s my background.” But he looks at it differently now. Yoga, he says, helped him realise that “screaming and violence” are not the best way to lead a team.

“What it taught me was to control my reaction, to control my emotions.”

He gestures towards the kitchen behind where we are sitting, which is modelled on the one in his restaurant. If a waiter drops a tray of plates on the pass — the narrow counter where chefs finish dishes and servers collect them — his old reaction would have been rage. But rage would not have solved the problem.

“Banging my fist on the table would not bring the plates back,” he says. So instead, he has learnt to respond calmly: “Okay, you know, please come clean this. Waiter, go tell the customer that he will have to wait five more minutes, offer him a glass of wine. Chef, start a new dish.”

The example is unremarkable, perhaps, but it reveals something deeper about how the father of two now sees the world.

He has little patience for dramatics, whether in kitchens or in life. People, he says, complain too easily. They mistake inconvenience for suffering. Missing a bus becomes a personal catastrophe. But in another place, he points out, there might not be a bus at all. For him, perspective matters.

Whenever he sees migrant workers riding in the back of lorries on his drive home, it snaps him out of self-pity every time, he says.

“Why am I complaining?” he asks himself. “Look at those guys.” He knows he has worked hard for the life he has. But he also knows others are working hard too.

“It’s just I had a chance,” he says, “and that is something which I will be thankful for the rest of my days, rather than taking things for granted.”

That language of gratitude surfaces again when Stroobant, who is a vegetarian, speaks about yoga more directly. Not as passive acceptance, but as santosha — contentment, or at least a sense of being grounded that keeps you from being thrown around by every irritation, delay or wounded ego.

“If you don’t get upset, you start seeing things with a smile,” he says. “Because you put on a smile, and you start having smiles around.”

None of this means he has become soft. If anything, he has become more exacting about what deserves his attention. He is skeptical of paper qualifications without real depth, suspicious of teachers who skim the surface of traditions they claim to represent, and impatient with spiritual posturing.

“I’m not a guru,” he says. “That’s certainly not an image I ever, ever, ever want to project.”

Are we there yet?

His own practice now reflects that shift. These days he wakes at 6.30am, drives his daughters to school, then begins his practice around 8am.

First weights, then asana, then breathing and meditation. Sometimes, on his way to work, he parks his car near the Botanic Gardens, rolls down the windows, and meditates for as long as 40 minutes, while listening to birds sing.

“I like birds, I like nature. It inspires me,” he says.

He still practises headstands every day. “That is the pose,” he says. “It gives me my standard.” Like a chef tasting a dish again and again, the practice tells him exactly how he feels that day: tired, distracted, or fully present.

“I know that recipe is always the same, so I can judge if it’s too salty or not too salty. I know what it should taste like.”

As the interview draws to a close, I glance back into the kitchen. Copper pots and pans catch the afternoon light. Along the wall, knives sit on individual wooden shelves, each carefully displayed, like objects in a small museum.

The contrast that shaped my first impression of him — a boxer’s rough physicality versus a chef’s delicate artistry — no longer feels like a contradiction. What connects the two is the same discipline: the patience to repeat the same work again and again, without complaint.

“Slow is the fastest way to go where you want to go,” he says.

It’s an idea that runs quietly through everything we have talked about. In yoga, where he recalls the satisfaction of inching, millimetre by millimetre, into a forward fold he once thought impossible; and in cooking, where a dish comes together only after years of repetition and refinement.

Perhaps in life too, where the real work is not arriving somewhere impressive, but returning — reliably, day after day — to the practice that makes getting there possible.

“We always forget the value of the travel before we reach the destination,” Stroobant says, with a glint in his eye. “Having something is not fun. Getting something — that’s the interesting part.”

Update: In 2026, Stroobant launched Saki, an eight-seat kappo counter at the JW Marriott Hotel Tokyo, in partnership with Shoukouwa’s head chef Kazumine Nishida.

The room is simple and functional. Bare walls. Fluorescent lights overhead. The floor cleared for movement. There are no mirrors, no speakers, no music.

Inside prison, time moves differently. When I arrive, the room is usually empty. I walk to the intercom and press the button, asking the officers to send the women down.

Then I wait.

Sometimes I wait a long time before anything begins. After a while, the first group of 15 women arrives. I teach two classes every visit — 30 women in total. The first group are women who are more physically mobile; the second are mostly elderly women and women with disabilities. They range from their 20s to 50s.

When they shuffle into the room, they are wearing the prison’s standard uniform: white T-shirts with their names printed across the chest, blue shorts, and rubber flip-flops. Some walk in chatting with one another. Others step in quietly, looking around with curiosity.

For the next hour, this room, stripped of mirrors, music or modern studio comforts, will be our yoga studio.

The classes take place inside Institution A4, the women’s facility within the Changi Prison Complex. It houses several hundred female inmates at any given time; women make up less than 10 percent of Singapore’s prison population. Many are serving sentences related to drug offences, theft, or financial crimes.

I do not know what most of the women in my classes did to end up here.

And I have never asked. In prison, the offence is both everything and beside the point. When the class begins, all I see are people in front of me — many with bodies that are stiff from long hours indoors. Back pain is common. They say it comes from sleeping on the floor. Some look skeptical. Many are guarded. A few seem unsure why they are there at all.

Most of the women have never done yoga before.

And until this moment, I had never taught yoga in a prison.

Correctional care

The first class did not go as planned. Before the first class, I prepared what I thought they would need: gentle stretches, slow movements, a quiet, restorative practice.

Many of the women moved cautiously at first. Some looked at the other women around them before attempting a pose. A few laughed nervously.

Then one of them raised her hand. “Teacher,” she asked. “Can you teach us how to do a handstand?”

The room burst into laughter.

Another voice joined in. “Yes! Teach us something strong.”

“I want core exercises.”

“How can I lose weight?”

These were not the requests I expected.

I had assumed they wanted something gentle. But what they were asking for was something strong. Over time I began to understand this better. They wanted exercises that made them feel good in their bodies — movements that helped them feel stronger, more capable, more confident.

Hip-opening exercises helped. Mobility work helped. But perhaps most important was the simple act of doing something for themselves.

Back to basics

Teaching in a prison feels very different. Inside these walls, none of the things we associate with modern yoga culture exist. No yoga mats neatly rolled out across the floor. No mirrors reflecting the shapes of the poses. No music to fill the air.

Most of the yoga classes I teach normally take place in studios — bright, comfortable spaces in the city. Students arrive in carefully chosen leggings and carry high-quality yoga mats. Many are strong, educated, and financially comfortable — people who have the time and resources to invest in their wellbeing.

Very quickly, I realised I could not teach here the way I teach in a studio.

In a modern yoga studio, we often talk about sequencing, alignment, creativity. We refine cues, explore transitions, design classes that feel elegant and cohesive.

In prison, none of that matters.

Every class has to begin from a different place. I think about what these women need physically, mentally, and emotionally. What movements can relieve the pain they carry in their bodies. What breathing techniques can help to regulate their emotions.

The women who return regularly now walk into the room with a little more ease. The guarded expressions soften. Some even smile when they see me. These changes did not happen all at once, but they have meant everything to me as a teacher.

One woman told me she had started practicing headstands in her cell. Another said she uses the breathing techniques I taught her when she feels herself getting angry. One of the older women once told me quietly after class:

“For one hour, I feel I can be with myself.”

There is also a woman who first attended the class in a wheelchair because of diabetes-related complications. In the beginning, she mostly observed, joining in only when she could make small movements with her body.

Gradually she began to do more.

Today, she walks into class on her own two feet.

Yoga without walls

I have now been teaching in the prison twice a month for about a year and a half. This program that I founded has now grown to a small group of volunteers, who take turns to teach. Looking back, the experience has changed me more than it has changed my students.

It reminded me of why I began teaching yoga in the first place, and that yoga, in its true purpose, is not about mastering poses or achieving beautiful shapes. It is about reclaiming a relationship with one’s own body and mind.

And that relationship can exist anywhere. Even inside prison walls.

When the class ends, the women leave the room and the corridor fills again with the sounds of the prison day continuing.

The door closes behind them, but from the way they move, I can tell the practice will continue to work quietly in their bodies.

Because even inside the most contained spaces, the breath can still move. And where the breath moves, something inside us can still be free.

Many of the rigid rules and etiquette she learnt during her days of practising yoga in the United States do not apply to conditions in Ramallah, she says, including strict policies on late arrivals at the studio.

“In Palestine, being late to yoga is not disrespectful, it’s survival,” she says.

“I don’t lock the door because I know students may be navigating winding roads, traffic, or checkpoints just to arrive. Sometimes, even 20 minutes of yoga is the only peace they’ll experience that day. I don’t believe in creating yet another barrier.”

Atway, 42, has been teaching yoga since 2014. She took it up professionally after moving from the US to Ramallah, where she wanted to raise her children closer to their Palestinian roots and family.

Going through a transformative journey of her own, navigating post-partum and moving across continents, the mother of three says the practice gave her a “sense of self and safety” that she now hopes to offer her Palestinian students.

“Yoga offers consistency – something incredibly rare in Palestine,” she says.

“You can plan your day carefully, only to be stopped by a checkpoint, a military raid, or a general strike that brings everything to a halt. Living under occupation is mentally and physically exhausting.”

As such, the Palestinian-American instructor has learnt to adapt her classes to better cater to her students and the realities of their surroundings. This includes teaching yoga without mirrors and showing up to class even when no one is there.

“Stillness can feel unfamiliar when your body is used to being on alert,” she says, adding: “So teaching without mirrors helps my students reconnect with themselves, not their reflection.”

She says she shows up to class “even if no one else is able to make it”.

“I want my students to know that whenever they can arrive, they’ll find me on the mat. That consistency is something life under occupation rarely allows.”

The occupied West Bank has a long history of Israeli settler and military violence, as well as land seizures. Last year saw unprecedented levels of violence, which have been on the rise since the start of the Gaza war in October 2023.

The UN’s humanitarian office recorded the highest number of settler attacks in the West Bank in October last year, since it began documenting such incidents in 2006. June witnessed the highest number of settler-inflicted injuries on Palestinians in two decades, according to UNRWA figures.

Aside from Israel’s brutal occupation, other challenges facing the yoga instructor include “creating a quiet space in the middle of Ramallah”.

“There are roosters, traffic, vendors calling out, and everyday life happening all around us,” she says. “Instead of resisting it, we make it part of the practice — learning to tune inward, focus on the breath, and find stillness within noise. In many ways, that becomes one of the most valuable lessons.”

Atway teaches yoga across Ramallah, including at the first yoga centre established in the occupied territory 15 years ago, where she tries to make her classes “as accessible as possible”.

“I want my students to leave feeling confident, empowered, and grounded. I want them to know that however they showed up that day — physically, emotionally, mentally — is enough. In a world that constantly tells us we’re not doing enough or being enough, my class is a place where they are exactly where they need to be.”

She describes practising yoga in the occupied Palestinian territory as a “form of resistance”.

“Living under a brutal military occupation that systematically strips away basic human rights is designed to exhaust and suffocate people. When we choose to show up — whether for our loved ones, our work, or ourselves — we are resisting that erasure,” she says.

“Choosing presence, care, and continuity in the face of oppression is an act of defiance. In that sense, yoga is resistance.”

This article was written by Fatima Al Mahmoud, edited by Yen Feng, and first appeared on The National on February 7, 2026.

After an hour of serious business, the whole group gets goofy.

Under the cheerful direction of laughter yoga leader Ruby Sparks, about 25 people who turned out on a recent Sunday capped off their Buddhism lesson with 15 minutes of authorised silliness.

They flashed big, exaggerated grins at one another, clapped in singsong rhythm, chanted “Ho-ho, ha-ha-ha”, giggled at balloon flowers, chatted into pretend cellphones, did some gentle dancing and formed a loose, no-contact conga line that briefly circled the room.

Everybody breathed deeply and gave thanks for community — and hilarity. Big smiles all around.

Laughter yoga is a relatively new — and pretty funny — wellness practice, launched in 1995 in India by Dr Madan Kataria, a family physician who systematised a series of simple yoga exercises and breathing techniques that provide the heart, muscles and brain an easy but beneficial workout.

Since then, laughter yoga has spread around the globe, with classes and clubs in over 120 countries, according to Laughter Yoga International.

Sparks said she discovered laughter yoga through her multifaceted career in public health and education. A Vietnam native who moved to the US 14 years ago, she has worked as a medical interpreter, a certified nursing assistant and a paraeducator in local schools. Recruited as a community-based health worker during the Covid-19 pandemic, Sparks confronted such widespread anxiety, stress, fear and isolation that she decided to pursue positivity itself as a health goal.

That’s how Sparks discovered this easy, free wellness practice based on focused, intentional laughter — even if that laughter is faked or forced, she said.

There are silly prompts and exercises to help you loosen up in laughter yoga, but no jokes, no rib pokes, no overt comedy. There’s only the physical act of laughing: big smile, quickened heartbeat, bouncing belly, deep and cleansing breaths.

It doesn’t matter whether those behaviours are spontaneous or pantomimed, Sparks said.

“Fake it ’til you make it” is key to laughter yoga, she said. “Your body cannot tell whether it is real or fake. Your body gets the same happy benefits.”

Fake laughter can lead to real laughter, Sparks added, and real laughter — like yawning — often proves contagious.

“If you start by pretending to laugh for just 1 or 2 minutes, your laughter often becomes real and spontaneous — especially when you’re doing it in a group. It’s much easier to laugh in a group than by yourself. At home, you can look in a mirror while doing laughter yoga to help trigger real laughter.”

Sparks said she was skeptical of all this silliness at first, but it grew on her. Eventually she trained online with the founder of the practice, and was certified as a laughter yoga leader.

“People often ask me, ‘Why are you always smiling?’” she said. “I tell them that I practise laughing a lot.”

Sparks and her daughter even attended the Florida Weekend of Laughter Celebration, held in honour of the 30th anniversary of laughter yoga, last spring in Florida.

“It’s a really amazing experience,” said Vancouver resident Lisa Bayautet, who’s been laughing along with Sparks at Buu Hung for two years. Bayautet first went to Buu Hung in order to connect a bereaved friend with comforting Buddhist teachings, but when she discovered Sparks’ laughter yoga sessions, she was hooked.

“I knew nothing about Buddhism,” she said. “Life is hard, and laughter makes it easier to digest.”

Bayautet brought that message home to her husband, who doesn’t attend laughter sessions. The couple make a point of introducing laughter into their lives daily — almost randomly. If you see a couple erupting in unexplained hilarity in the cereal aisle, she said, it’s probably them.

“It’s an odd practice, laughing for no reason,” Bayautet said. “But there’s science behind laughter.”

Happy hormones

Laughter enhances oxygen intake. It stimulates the heart, lungs, muscles and brain. It decreases the stress hormone cortisol and revs up the release of “feel-good” hormones like endorphins and dopamine, which increase pleasure, relieve pain, improve mood and promote feelings of well-being.

It also activates the what’s called the “parasympathetic” nervous system, inducing a slower, relaxed metabolism. (That’s the opposite of the sympathetic nervous system, which sparks our stressed-out, fight-or-flight response.)

Those are short-term effects, but long-term benefits can accrue.

A negative outlook on life can bathe the body in chemical stressors that reduce physical immunity, according to the Mayo Clinic. But maintaining a positive, even humorous, vibe “can actually release neuropeptides that help fight stress and potentially more-serious illnesses”.

Laughter can even boost cognitive function, focus and memory, according to Stanford Lifestyle Medicine.

In 2020, a journal called Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice published what it said was the first wide-ranging review of medical literature on laughter yoga, and concluded that the practice has impressive effects on older adults’ physical health (better blood pressure, cortisol levels and sleep quality) as well as their self-reported psychosocial health (more happiness, satisfaction and quality of life and less loneliness, depression and death anxiety).

Since then, the science on laughter as therapy — including laughter yoga — has been stacking up. In 2022, a four-week controlled study of 101 nurses working during the Covid-19 pandemic found that laughter yoga sessions contributed significantly to less stress, less burnout and more satisfaction with quality of life.

Other studies have found that laughter yoga has similar benefits for people experiencing different sorts of stresses, whether mundane (like studying hard in college) or extraordinary (like struggling with addiction or suffering with serious, even incurable disease).

And, studies have even confirmed the value of “faking it ’til you make it”.

“Simulated” smiling and laughing activate the same neural pathways and feel-good chemicals as spontaneous smiling and laughing. Some studies have even found the simulated behaviours to be more beneficial than the spontaneous behaviour.

“In laughter yoga, we use the body to lead the mind,” Sparks said.

All that science underlines Bayautet’s personal experience attending laughter yoga sessions and getting to know some of her fellow therapeutic laughers.

“Some people struggle to feel well,” she said. “Some people just wake up feeling, ‘I’m not well today. I just don’t feel right. I’m not in the right place and I don’t feel like I can deal with people.’”

People who struggle with such moods might get a lot out of the childlike joy and connection that comes from laughter yoga, she said.

“It’s a great mechanism for people to come together in a very safe space and do something fun,” Bayautet said. “I feel a real connection with those people.”

“It is beautiful, it is amazing, what Rudy does,” said Venerable Suco Hue Huong, who enjoys laughing along with the group after her Buddhism lesson.

“My lecture is very, very serious. But then you can stay and have fun. It is very good for you!”

This article was written by Scott Hewitt, edited by Yen Feng, and first appeared in The Columbian, on January 31, 2026.

Tall, lean, and tanned, he meets me as the lift opens to his floor in an apartment in Orchard Road. His hair is neatly combed, posture relaxed but upright. He greets me with the practised warmth of someone used to being at the front of a room.

It’s 3pm in the afternoon, and his home is quiet, spacious, filled with natural light. During the interview, we sit outside on his balcony that overlooks the back of the street’s iconic shopping centres. His dog Pudding, an adopted companion with a gorgeous, creamy coat the colour of the dessert it’s named after, is resting by my feet. I hear Skimbleshanks, his other pet, a black feline, somewhere in the background. His partner, a fashion director at an international brand, is at work.

By any conventional measure, Victor’s professional trajectory is similarly impressive: a career in luxury fashion PR, then years of teaching yoga in Beijing, Hong Kong and around the world in more than 20 cities. One of Lululemon’s earliest ambassadors in Hong Kong, the youthful 46-year-old has almost 11,000 followers on Instagram.

It is the kind of CV that charts a seamless ascent in the yoga world — one any full-time yoga teacher, including myself, would be envious of.

But the story I’m here to listen to begins with a fall.

The fall that started it all

His “obsession” — as he put it, began in India. In 2010, after more than 10 years of working in public relations, and practising yoga, he decided to take up teacher training in an ashram by the Ganges River.

During his training, he remembers falling in countless handstand attempts while another trainee, who was a gymnast, kicked up effortlessly.

“She just did it,” he recalls. “Like it was nothing.”

That lit up something in him. A curiosity sharpened by the thrill of a challenge.

He tells the story plainly, as if there’s no need to explain his obsession: You see what’s possible, you realise you can’t do it, you decide you will.

It’s that simple.

After his training ended, he began to seek out teachers who were known for getting upside down. They included Dice Iida-Klein and Briohny Smyth, whose acrobatic moves had already begun influencing global yoga culture long before “influencer” was a job description; Miguel Sant’ana, whose workshops brought Brazilian athleticism into yoga spaces; and Yuval Ayalon, a Paris-based handstand teacher whose refinement of the practice left a lasting impression on him.

Victor didn’t just attend their classes. He tracked down trainings and workshops and practised tirelessly. “Once something grips me,” he says, “I want it.”

The confession comes with a knowing smile — the kind people wear when they know they have a trait that’s not going to change. He describes it as something fixed early in his childhood: As a kid, if he wanted a toy, he would “beg and bug and annoy” his parents until he got it, he says.

The adult Victor can afford his own toys now, but he’s still the same kid.

When it came to inversions, that meant repetition with a laser-like focus: kick up, fall, kick up, fall, kick up again. Thirty or 40 times in a single practice session — every day.

“Just one of my practice sessions already includes more handstands than what most people do in a year,” he says, explaining why many practitioners stay stuck at the wall.

“If you want to improve on something, you need to put in the work,” he says. “Even on days you don’t feel like doing it, you still do it.”

But his point isn’t really about effort for effort’s sake. The more he talks about how his inversion practice has evolved, the clearer it becomes that he no longer treats a perfectly executed handstand as the prize.

“Yes and no,” he says, when I ask if inversions are still his favourite type of pose to practise. Handstands, he now says, are “just one way of moving the body”.

When willpower hits a wall

I came to the interview prepared to talk about inversions, but we quickly dive into his other “obsessions” — after all, his first encounter with handstanding in India happened more than 15 years ago.

His eyes light up when he starts talking about the sea. And that’s when I notice — Victor’s face is handsome in a way that’s perfect for the camera — strong features, symmetrical, expressive, but up close I can see the faint weathering around his eyes, the kind that doesn’t come from studio lights but from years of sun, salt air, and squinting into open water.

For the past few years, that water was Hong Kong’s.

Before moving to Singapore, his home was five minutes from the sea. On clear mornings — and many not-so-clear ones — he would venture out on his paddle board, sometimes in fog so thick that the horizon disappeared. He would pick up his compass, call up Google Maps on his phone, and go out to sea anyway. People worried. His mother, knowing what he was like, would call him during typhoon warnings to make sure he wasn’t out there.

But then he learnt to read the weather. To track wind. To respect currents. Out there, he says, you realise very quickly how insignificant you are. You can be strong, confident, have years of experience at sea, and still entirely be at the mercy of something larger.

It’s a theme that shows up too when he talks about baking sourdough bread — another long-running fixation of his, before it became a pandemic hobby.

In bread, he says, the ingredients are simple: water, flour, salt. The starter itself is water and flour. His early loaves, he admits, were often delicious but “hard as bricks”. He kept adjusting technique, hydration, shaping — but nothing worked.

He couldn’t understand why, until he watched a video that changed the way he thought about baking. There was a fourth ingredient, the baker said: time.

And Victor, who had always wanted everything “right now,” had an a-ha moment.

“I wanted it now,” he says, amused at his younger self, “But the dough doesn’t care.”

The different threads of our conversation begin to come together. Listening to him move from handstands to weather systems to bread, what strikes me is not how different these fixations are, but how similar.

In each one, Victor begins the same way. With the belief that if he pushes hard enough, he can get to where he wants to go.

But out at sea, strength doesn’t matter if the current turns. In baking, ingredients and technique don’t accelerate time. And in handstands, practice can only take you so far; balance comes when you let go of your fear of falling.

“Every time you come up to a handstand or inversion, it's like you're trying to find that oh shit moment — ‘I'm going to fall down.’ … Every time, once you find that moment where you feel like you're falling down, it's actually where you need to be.”

For someone whose instinct, since childhood, has been to keep pushing, he seems most drawn to practices that keep teaching him to surrender.

An inversion of a different kind

Victor officially moved to Singapore in July last year. At first, he arrived on a tourist visa. It took another two to three months to secure an Employment Pass — a process he describes as paperwork-heavy but, in hindsight, surprisingly smooth.

Compared with the stories he has heard from other foreigners, he considers himself “very, very fortunate”.

Still, logistics aren’t the only challenge.

He had delayed the move, he admits, not because he didn’t want to come, but because he loved the life he had built in Hong Kong. He loved where he lived — and especially the fact that the sea was just five minutes from his front door.

Not so here in his Orchard Road condo.

The water sports scene here, he says, is more fragmented, more expensive to navigate; the sense of open, everyday access he had before isn’t the same.

He is candid about the emotional side of starting over. Despite his partner living and working in Singapore, he has had to set himself up independently. There is the practical business of building a network, finding the “right kind of people”, figuring out where he fits in a new landscape.

“I’m not just staying here for a year or two,” he says. “I want to really make it work.”

It’s a line that reminds me of our how our conversation started: with his obsession with handstands — except, this time, the balance hasn’t quite arrived.

As we wrap up, the late-afternoon light shifts across his apartment. Below us, Orchard Road hums — the faint rhythm of a city like the one he used to live in. Pudding lifts his head, stirs, and settles back at my feet.

Victor sits up in his chair and looks out of the balcony. From this height, the world looks still. But he knows better than most: balance is never fixed. It’s something you keep finding, one small adjustment at a time.

You can find Victor on his Instagram here @victorchauyoga.

We’re 32 floors up at Sathorn Nakhon Tower, in a lounge that feels almost too bright—Bangkok’s morning light pouring through the studio’s large windows, making everything look photoshoot-ready. It’s an oddly fitting setting for a conversation about yoga in 2026: elevated, polished, a little removed from the everyday. And yet, if you listen closely, still rooted to something ancient and enduring.

He smiles often, with an ease that makes you want to relax too. But there’s seriousness underneath it: he shifts his posture when he’s thinking, leaning in slightly as if the right alignment might help the right sentence to land. When I ask if he had time to look over the questions I sent, he says, “Just a little” — but his answers, measured and reflective, suggest the opposite. This is, he tells me, his first interview. He admits he’s a bit nervous. The honesty makes him more charming, not less.

He has been teaching yoga for nearly 13 years, and has lived in Bangkok for almost 12 of them. He’s 35 now — meaning that most of his adult identity as a teacher has been forged in Thailand, not India. He teaches at Yoga Sutra in Sathorn, and, in the last two years, has also become what many teachers quietly dream of becoming and quietly fear becoming: a studio owner. His new space is in Chatuchak. He does much of the teaching himself, supported by Thai teachers; he is currently the only Indian teacher on the roster. “Very busy now,” he says, without complaint. After our interview, he’ll teach two classes in Sathorn, then head across town to teach more at his own studio.

This shape of life — a full schedule, split loyalties, work that begins before sunrise and extends beyond dinner — is familiar in the yoga world. What’s less common is the clarity with which Sandeep can name what he’s doing and why he’s doing it. His story isn’t just about building a career in Bangkok; it’s about translating a practice across cultures without flattening it into a product. And, perhaps more than that, it’s about holding onto responsibility in a profession that is increasingly incentivised to entertain.

Even his name contains a small lesson in adaptation.

“I usually use this,” he says, when I ask about the name he goes by. “Actually, my full name is Sandeep Singh Rana.” In school, the surname was dropped. Later, paperwork and habit cemented the shortened version. He could use Rana, he says, but it complicates things — people might assume he’s someone else. So he stays Sandeep Singh. Not out of branding strategy, but out of practicality: “It can be misunderstanding,” he says almost sheepishly.

Misunderstanding — of names, of meanings, of yoga itself — threads through much of what we talked about.

Sandeep was born and raised in Rishikesh, the Himalayan city that has become, for many, synonymous with yoga pilgrimage. “Everybody goes to Rishikesh,” he says, with a little laugh, and adds Mysore as the other inevitable point on the map. But he doesn’t romanticise his childhood there. If anything, he de-mythologises it.

“My earliest memory,” he says, “yoga was nothing too special. Not like separate. It was like a way of life.” He remembers sadhus by the river — men sitting still, meditating, practising pranayama — though, as a teenager, he didn’t understand what he was watching. He just watched. Yoga, in his description, wasn’t a class you sign up for; it was part of the atmosphere. Posters on the street. Elders practising. Friends who knew the shapes of yoga because they were surrounded by them.

His family didn’t have a yoga background, he says. He didn’t inherit it at home. He stumbled into practice the way most teenagers do: through friends. “At first, I just go for the practice… just for fun,” he says. He was 17 or 18, in college, and yoga was simply an activity, another way to move, another way to pass an afternoon. Then, after a few months, it started to work on him in a deeper way.

“I realise it’s changing my body,” he says, “and the same time… my attitude.” That line lands with quiet conviction, like it still surprises him. It’s the pivot point: the moment yoga stops being something you do, and becomes something that does something back.

In India, he explains, “you do not go for 200 hour, 300 hour.” The now-global teacher training structure wasn’t the primary route. Instead, he pursued what he calls “proper education”: a one- or two-year university programme, a diploma, a degree, and the possibility of a PhD. He considered the PhD, he says, but opportunities came, as they do, and he chose to work instead.

“It’s kind of a mix of opportunities, and curiosity,” he says. He had begun teaching in India, and then a friend already in Thailand told him about a job opening. He was 23 or 24 — his first time leaving India. His family, while supportive, missed him, of course. And in that era, before the ease of video calls, the distance felt farther. Still, he made the leap.

When I ask what surprised him most about his journey from Rishikesh to Bangkok, he pauses, then answers with a sentence that could be a thesis statement for the global yoga industry — if it weren’t so personal.

“As I see, the yoga has travelled far… and it still remains yoga,” he says. “It feels like yoga does not just belong to one country. It adapts.”

Adaptation is a lovely idea until you have to live it. When he arrived in Bangkok, Sandeep taught the way he had been trained: gentle, breath-led, with awareness and pranayama. It did not go well.

“Honestly,” he says, “I got really very bad feedback.” His early classes were described as slow, easy — too soft for people who wanted their yoga to feel like fitness. “People really don’t want to get that deep,” he says. “They just want… more physical workout.”

Here, Sandeep is careful not to sound reproachful. He doesn’t dismiss the students. He treats their expectations as a reality a teacher must meet. He learned to teach differently, not by abandoning the deeper practice, but by changing the doorway.

“Asana could be the first door for you,” he says, brightening as the metaphor arrives. “As you enter the temple… the yoga temple.”

It’s a gentle reframing: you don’t have to begin with philosophy to eventually arrive at it. In fact, he admits, he didn’t begin with the ethical limbs of yoga either.

“I don’t know… yama, niyama,” he says, recalling his younger self. “We’re enjoying the practice… and then slowly we realise this whole other thing.”

What he is protective of is not how people enter yoga, but the integrity of where it is supposed to lead.

The current 200-hour and 300-hour trainings are designed for those who cannot stay in India for one or two years, he says. He doesn’t reject these new systems of training; he understands why they exist. But he’s frank about their limits. “Not enough, never,” he says. “Yoga is very deep.” Even 500 hours cannot cover it all. At best, he suggests, these programmes can teach something more important than shapes.

“You’re not going to learn yoga actually,” he says. “You’re going to learn how to live your life.”

In the West — and increasingly across Asia — he observes that teacher training often becomes a study of sequencing. Sequencing has value, he says, and he uses it too. But the deeper question: why you practise, what the goal of yoga is beyond the asanas, can get lost, especially in studio culture where time is limited and expectations are high.

“You cannot teach them history or philosophy,” he says. “They just need their workout… their sweat.” The job becomes subtler: “As much as you can, try to make them connected for one hour.”

Connection is his recurring metric. When I ask what makes a class well taught, he doesn’t say alignment. He doesn’t say peak pose. He doesn’t say how many people attended. He says something both disarmingly simple and surprisingly direct.

“When the people leave the studio,” he says, “they should smile on their face.”

If they don’t smile, he assumes he didn’t do his job. He wants them more connected than when they arrived. Sweat is fine. But the point is feeling. “It’s all about feeling,” he says, and he means it.

He’s also realistic: not everyone will respond the same way. A room of 15 contains 15 versions of readiness. Some will want depth; some just want flexibility. “It’s okay,” he says. “We accept that.” The teacher’s work, as he sees it, is not to force philosophy onto unwilling people, but to keep offering the possibility of something more — sometimes through a steady class, sometimes through humour, sometimes through conversation.

“Only the asana is not enough,” he says. “Sometimes you can release their tension, their anxiety, just by the talking.”

This is where his critique of modern yoga sharpens. He doesn’t object to yoga evolving; he insists it must. “Yoga must evolve,” he says. “But do not forget its roots.” The line he cannot tolerate is when yoga becomes pure gimmick: wine yoga, beer yoga, pet yoga. He sighs, almost pained. “As a fun way, okay,” he concedes. “But don’t call it yoga.”

If there’s one contradiction he’s struggling with, it’s this: yoga’s global popularity has created opportunities for teachers like him to build meaningful lives abroad — but the same popularity can hollow the practice out. His response isn’t purity policing. It’s responsibility.

One of his university teachers told him that yoga is a responsibility — something you must share “in the right way.” Sandeep carries that idea like a quiet vow. It shows up again when we talk about being an Indian teacher in Thailand. He notes that many Thai students prefer Indian teachers — partly because teachers from India, which is the birthplace of yoga, must know best. He admits he feels pride. Then he corrects himself: “But the same time… responsibility too.”

Owning a studio intensifies that responsibility. His studio is called Yog Abhyas Bangkok — and he insists on the language. “It’s not a yoga,” he says gently. “It’s a yog.” Yog: the Sanskrit root. Abhyas: practice. No hype, no promise of transformation in 10 sessions. Just practice — daily, imperfect, sincere.

He tells me he offers more pranayama, more depth, more meditation, more awareness in movement. In his own space, he has more ability to shape the experience, to nudge students beyond the purely physical.

At the end, I ask a deliberately light question: one pose everyone should practise more. He resists the premise. One pose can’t do anything, he says; you need the whole practice. But he offers an answer anyway: Tadasana. Stand, rise onto your toes, stretch from head to foot. Begin with simplicity.

When I ask where he goes to unwind in Bangkok, he doesn’t name a fashionable bar or a new restaurant. He says he likes mountains, quiet cafés, the open water. And when I ask what he misses most about India, his voice drifts back to Rishikesh.

“The Ganga River,” he says. “The silence of early morning.”

He means the Ganges River — a sacred, 2,500 km long river flowing from the Himalayas through northern India and Bangladesh to the Bay of Bengal, but whose true name is Ganga.

It’s not a conclusion so much as a return to where it all began. And with that, he checks the time, straightens his posture, and goes to teach.

Teach a 20-minute class.
Begin with five minutes of grounding and pranayama.
Include one set of sun salutations.
End with two minutes of recl…

Read more

Leaving on Sunday, I started walking to my sister’s house. It was the first night of Hanukah, the Jewish festival of lights, and we were goi…

Read more

“We were in quite a big roo…

Read more

But her story, as told in a recent South China Morning Post interview, reveals that ageing well isn’t about shortc…

Read more

Here are the three things she prioritises every sing…

Read more

I heard the first hum, and I was hooked.

Something in that sound, in the voice of the artist — open, spacious, unh…

Read more

“The best exercise is the one you’ll do.”

It’s something I’ve heard many times before, something I’ve even said to others, but reading it now — in the context of a centenarian who still shows up, teaches, practises and lives this truth — felt…

Read more

Kali is the fierce Divine Mother in Hindu tradition — the one who destroys illusions, cuts through attachments, dismantles …

Read more

Most people see yoga as a series of sequences, poses, and shapes. They look at the shapes made in a yoga class and think it’s beyond their ability, and give up.

Yoga has never been only about the external forms.

Yes, we do practise creating shap…

Read more