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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
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