Australian_Yoga_Journal_2016_08_09_downmagaz.com

august/september 2016 yogajournal.com.au
98
inspiration
AYJ INTERVIEW
Faith healer
Atira Tan, 36, is a yoga teacher and founder of The Art2Healing
Project, a non-profit organisation that supports the recovery
of sex traffic survivors in Asia with creative arts therapies and
awareness-based practices such as yoga and meditation.
Atira, who has degrees in counselling and art therapy, began
Art2Healing because she felt a deep sense of empathy with sex
trafficking victims and the trauma they endured. She has had
an extraordinary personal journey and strongly believes she
healed herself from cervical cancer ten years ago. Despite the
validity of her claims, Atira’s unshakable faith and her dedication
to reconnecting with her body through yoga and ayurveda, has
allowed her to help and teach other women how to recover
from their own trauma. By Tamsin Angus-Leppan
How did you first come to yoga?
I was about 16, I had just moved from
Singapore to Melbourne and I was seeking
answers to some spiritual experiences I
had been having at that time. I still
remember the visceral feeling of coming
out of my first yoga class; I just felt so
expanded, incredibly open and in love with
life. I was hooked on the physical asana
practice and I adopted the worldview of
yoga.
How did you become a yoga
teacher?
In 2004, I set out to travel the world. But I
went first to Cambodia and ended up
staying and working with sex traffic
survivors there for three years. I was
working as an art therapist and mental
health practitioner and I was doing my
yoga practice as a way of sustaining
myself. Later I worked in the Burmese
refugee camps too, in the northern part of
Thailand. In 2006 while I was there, I was
diagnosed with cervical cancer. It was a
shock to me … I was vegan, I wasn’t even
drinking coffee, and I was doing lots of
yoga. I went on a remarkable journey of
healing and self-discovery because after
my first operation, I refused to go for more
operations and I got this sense that I was
able to heal myself. So I took a whole year
off work and lived in an ashram in Thailand,
and dedicated my efforts to healing
myself. A great part of my
healing journey was ayurveda
and I was doing yoga and
meditating many hours a
day, changing my diet and
researching the core of my
illness. After eight months,
I was clear of the cancer.
After this I did my first
teacher training in Thailand.
How did this experience
influence you?
It was a really important part of my life
because now, what I teach to the women,
is based on an experience of healing
myself. The women I work with have a lot
of reproductive health issues as well, for
example, HIV and STIs and they don’t
have good medical care. A lot of what we
do at Art2Healing is teaching women how
to love themselves from the inside, so
reconnecting to those places in their body
that might have held traumatic
experiences. We try to help women have a
visceral experience of the body and, in my
experience, yoga has been an incredible
tool for recovery. Being born Asian, I grew
up with the conditioning that women are
lesser than men even though in Singapore
the issue of gender disparity is not as full
on as in other parts of Asia. The cancer
brought me to a deeper place of healing,
not from the mind but from the body, and
so I was able relate to the women I work
with in a deeper way. During my healing I
had to reclaim my own sovereignty as a
woman and break through my unconscious
conditioning. Before that when I worked
with the women, it was more intellectual,
empathic, but not from my own
experience. The concept of self-love and
self-care is quite foreign for these women
because their whole life is about serving
others. Yoga reconnects them with their
body in a safe way, it gives them time for
themselves, and they feel worthy of love
and care.
What are you currently
working on?
After the Nepal earthquake, a lot of
traffickers came in straight away to take
away girls who’d lost their families and
homes. A lot of Nepalese children are
vulnerable to trafficking and have been
trafficked to India and China. The
situation is pretty dire. We’ve started a
long-term psychological first aid program
there. My constant inspiration is the
joy these women and girls have.
Despite having lost everything, they
have this connection to joy as a state of
being. I see their gratitude, acceptance of
what comes, and their courage, and it
moves me immensely.
For more information about Atira’s Nepal project,
visit www.yogathonforpeace.org
Australian Yoga Journal holds no responsibility for the
content of claims made during an interview.
PHOTO: ARTERIUM