Suan Sati – Yoga and Meditation retreat

3 years ago I was lucky enough to find myself in the situation of ‘perfect place, perfect time, perfect people’. This is just a very short recap on my time at Suan Sati highlighting some of the images taken over the years. The real magic will have to be explained at another time.

Volunteering at Suan Sati in Sept 2016, a place at which time not many people had heard of, I arrived with 5 others for what I thought was two weeks of helping to construct some bamboo structures, eating a few vegan meals and doing my very first classes of yoga and meditation.

Four months later and saying goodbye felt like leaving family.

I was fortunate enough to be able to return a few months later to complete a 200 yoga teacher training course at Suan Sati with Buddho yoga. During that time I provided a series of images for the students and do some private location shoots with a few soon-to-be yoga teachers.

Now 3 years and several trips to Chiang Mai , I was at Will and Lisa’s new location in the rice fields to the south of Chiang Mai. It’s such a beautiful area surrounded by the mountains of Northern Thailand. I was there in November, just before the rice was ready to be harvested so things were looking pretty much perfect. Much better than the previous January when all I could see was a field of golden dust with about two half built houses and an unfinished kitchen structure.

The new Suan Sati is located south of Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand in the rice fields of Mae Wang.

Having now hosted a whole season of 6 day yoga retreats, the amount of work that has happened at Suan Sati since January is almost unimaginable. Such a transformation. As the website was in need of updating now I was able to provide Suan Sati with a set of new property images and a short promo video featuring a timelapse of the setting sun and night sky that followed. If you look closely you can see some lanterns

Hoping to get back to Suan Sati sometime next year to see the family and get the opportunity to take some more photos of this life changing place and people.

The original Suan Sati started as a rugged jungle block of land and became a place of jungle joy.