Finding Meaning and Finding Home
Melbourne Yogi Karen Chow and I meet for breakfast in a quintessentially Melbourne cafe, bustling with suit-clad workers on their morning commute.
“We live in a society where there is a pressure to deliver all the time,” she says. “Modern day life is so busy we don’t have time for downtime.”
Yoga has become a personal shrine for Karen, captivated by its benefits and the affects it has on and for the mind and body. It was here in Melbourne only a few years ago that Karen found her own meaning within yoga and the city itself. However, it was in the chaotic city of Chennai, India amongst the heated streets and noisy traffic that Karen first learned the philosophy behind the calming practice.
Karen acknowledges that it seems an odd place to teach the craft of yoga, yet as her teacher explained to her “it is in chaos that we need yoga.” Karen’s love for yoga began ten years ago (“I can’t believe it’s been ten years!” she quips), during her search for a form of exercise she enjoyed. “I hate exercise with a passion,” she says. “I have no coordination.” Unenthused by the various faster-paced gym classes, she accompanied a friend to a yoga class one day and finally found a type of fitness she liked. Yoga continued to be present in her life for around six years, but was impeded by the corporate world. Working as an economist in South Africa after emigrating from Hong Kong with her family, Karen found herself dissatisfied with crunching numbers. She started questioning the meaning of her work which, as she says with a laugh was “… essentially analysing numbers to help people get richer.” It wasn’t until 2011 that Karen decided to exit her unfulfilling corporate environment and travel to India to “find herself” and study yoga in-depth.
Karen came away from India knowing that teaching, in some capacity, was what she really wanted to do in life, for it created the meaning which she felt she had been missing.
She just had to decide where to do so, knowing that South Africa was no longer the place for her. “I wanted to move back to Hong Kong but I didn’t feel ‘Asian’ enough”, she says with great honesty. “Yet, I was still a foreigner in South Africa.” It appeared to be fate when her first yoga teacher invited her to teach yoga in Melbourne, and the decision became simple. Since then, Karen has never looked back, fitting straight into Melbourne and its ever-growing yoga scene, a culture which she says is becoming increasingly popular. “I had that feeling when you feel like you are doing what you’re born to do,” she says, having not only fallen in love with yoga but Melbourne as well. “When i came to Melbourne there was just something about it – for the first time I felt at home in a place, even though i didn’t know it at all.”
Whilst Karen says she finds it rewarding to be able to offer physical benefits to her clients who partake in her classes, it is the mental and emotional benefits which captivate her. Oddly enough, she teaches a lot of corporate classes, giving the type of desk worker she once was, a chance to escape the hectic swirl of numbers and emails. Yoga itself is a shrine to the inner awareness and wellbeing of the person, not just an exercise. It is the offering of a sanctuary which yoga provides from the stresses of everyday life which is one of the most important things, she tells me. It provides a safe place for the release of stress, and what sets it aside from other exercise is the time for breathing and body awareness.
“Yoga is a way of life,” she says. “Initially its an exercise, but over time through practice, you discover things about yourself. How you do something on the mat can reflect how you react in life.”