We advance to Anusara

Canadian Christophe Cappon, who teaches Anusara yoga in Chiang Mai, is holding his first retreat in Bangkok over four days early next month.

“What I love most about Anusara yoga is how it seamlessly fuses profound, tangible and inspiring philosophical messages with sophisticated and effective bio-mechanical alignment,” Cappon says. “I admire it as the junction point between East and West, which has been the threshold I’ve walked my entire life.”

Cappon says Anusara – now a registered yoga trademark – takes its name from the Sanskrit word meaning “flow with grace”, “follow the heart” and align with nature’s laws. It’s a marriage of the ancient wisdom with modern science, he says, and it leaves you “glowing from the inside out”.

Cappon has been a yoga practitioner since 2005, when he first arrived in India after earning a bachelor’s degree in international development and aboriginal and Hispanic studies.

“I soon found the usual tourist circuit rather redundant and I was searching for an alternative approach to discovering the country. So I took up yoga, and before I knew it I was criss-crossing the subcontinent, sleeping in ashrams, tracing timeless pilgrim routes and encountering various teachers.”

Anusara yoga impressed him most.

“All of the poses are sequenced according to the degree of challenge to help students at all levels advance,” he says, saying its “universal principles of alignment” allow students to integrate other hatha yoga systems and movements.

It emphasises “seeing the good in ourselves, each other and the world”, Cappon says, resulting in Anusara becoming “one of the most popular and fastest-growing styles of yoga today”.

Cappon teaches annually at the small Namo yoga studio in Chiang Mai. He first came to Thailand while still a student at Trent University in Canada, spending two years studying here and in Alicante, Spain.

“One of my first memories of Thailand is being welcomed so warm-heartedly by my host family, who I’m still in contact with. They taught me how to speak the language, celebrate Loy Krathong, whip up my first gaeng hang lay and keep smiling through life’s eternally changing circumstances.”

Nor will Cappon forget visiting the hill tribes and seeing how they live in spiritual harmony with nature. He admires native peoples’ ability to attune to their surroundings and recognise how their existence is part of the larger web of creation.

“This is something we yogis can practise on a daily basis – nurturing our awareness of the breath, appreciating the food we eat, and being grateful for our friendships.”

His first Bangkok yoga retreat will delve into this while offering a radical shift in how most people understand yoga and the concept of healthy living.

BRIGHTEN UP
<< “Brighten the Inner Body” takes place from January 8 to 11 at the Peninsula Hotel Bangkok.
<< Marion Menu, who specialises in detoxification massage, will join Cappon in offering twice-daily yoga classes, massage, lifestyle counselling and healthy meals.
<< The cost including a grand deluxe room at the hotel is Bt33,000 (single occupancy) and Bt42,000 (double), or Bt10,000 without accommodation.
<< Book a spot at (02) 626 1918 or [email protected].