Trading a business suit for yoga mats

By Chantal Anderson (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-11-12 13:03

The day Sha Jin decided to swap his life as a promotions inventor for a career in yoga, his mother called him crazy. And she wasn't the only one.

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All his family and friends were shocked when he revealed he was going to found a yoga retreat in the foothills of Beijing in 2003, not to mention his plans to visit Australia to study satyananda.

"I got used to saying, you know what? I am crazy," said 45-year-old Sha. "I made up my mind and decided to do things that I love regardless of fame or shame, life or death."

Today, he runs what many regard as the first dedicated yoga retreat in China. Mountain Yoga, which also doubles as his home, is close to the Fragrant Hills and is decorated with bamboo walkways and has an indoor pond.

The center offers one-day and multi-day retreats that combine yoga with life and activities such as hiking, camping, drumming, cooking, writing calligraphy and painting. It is a relative Shangri-La to the many Chinese and Western yogis who stay.

Sha's personal change came while he spent 18 months recovering from a broken leg he suffered in a motorcycle accident. It allowed him the time to contemplate his past, present and future.

In the end, he chose to pick a new career doing something he was passionate about (at that time in advertising) over a monthly salary of 500 yuan in 1993 working as an account executive at the London Expo Company.

Ultimately, this realization led him to open Mountain Yoga ten years later. He now refers to his accident as a "gift".

Sha got the idea for the retreat during dinner with a friend who was a yoga instructor, who said she had been invited to give a class at a cafeteria.

"Suddenly it clicked, and I asked her, 'Why teach there, when I have this home in the mountains?'" he said.

Soon his friend was teaching at his home and, with a little bit of advertising, the center grew in popularity. Foreigners from across the globe began visiting as a way of taking a quiet break from the noise of city life.

A demonstration of yoga's growth within the Chinese population has been seen first-hand at Mountain Yoga, Sha said.

In earlier years Westerners far outnumbered the Chinese guests, but today he estimates Chinese make up 80-90 percent of his students. He said this signals an interest in spirituality similar to the one seen in the US in the 1960s when yoga was growing in popularity.

"People are not just coming to practice in a studio and get a beautiful body shape, they are thinking about getting back to nature and searching for inner freedom," he said.

He practices what he calls "karma yoga" every day by doing things to help his center, while also painting and doing calligraphy, which he sees as art yoga.

Yoga was first introduced in China in the 1980s when CCTV broadcasted a series of exercise shows hosted by Zhang Huilan.

However, Sha said the growing wealth among Chinese has made them more open to alternative means of relaxation and spirituality. "I've been happy every single day since I gave up my business life," he said. "I haven't had one sleepless night."