Yoga Space Siem Reap: A Final Pivot for social enterprise Baby Elephant Group

Need something to take your mind off what’s happening elsewhere in the world? In Cambodia, you can now join yoga and breathwork classes online. A community of international world-class teachers will be facilitating interactive online yoga classes from a tropical Siem Reap boutique hotel.

From August 2nd, 2021 you can join interactive live online classes with yoga teachers taught from tropical Siem Reap, the gateway to Angkor Wat. 

Australian Ilana Tulloch, award-winning co-founder, and chief marketing officer of Baby Elephant Group, a group of social enterprises aimed at empowering Cambodians, has come up with this latest pivot as she continues to save the hotel and its associated brands, in collaboration with Siem Reap’s yoga community led by accomplished yoga teacher Camilla Valsecchi.

“Yogaspace.asia is the culmination of years of hard work from everyone involved. An innovation born of necessity due to the Covid-19 crisis, but the fruit of many years of labour. We couldn’t be more excited to share this experience with you,” Ilana said.

Saving Yoga Space Siem Reap from closing in 2019 by negotiating to buy it before it went out of business, then again at the start of the pandemic by moving it into her multi-award-winning Baby Elephant Boutique Hotel, Ilana Tulloch is once again trying to save it. But this time, she’s looking outward to engage with Australians, who simply can’t come to Cambodia right now as they once did. 

Lead Yoga Teacher Camilla Valsecchi said: “We need help. This is our last chance to stay alive. We want to be hopeful about the future and slowly normalise but we have been affected so drastically that we just trust this at the moment. We hold the space for travellers, for yogis, for seekers all over the world who were coming to Siem Reap and who were with us as a family and community.” 

We hope to grow our community worldwide through our online platform now.

The badly hit tourism industry has been described as “dead on arrival”, but Baby Elephant is one of the few boutique hotels to continue to fight for jobs. This has included offering yoga classes with a team of international teachers. They’ve been dedicated to helping people through the mental health crisis of Covid through the classes, and it complimented our need to have people visiting the hotel for the preservation of our social enterprise mission. 

The classes are providing much-needed work for tourism workers who would otherwise have lost their jobs by now due to the complete lack of tourism. 

Classes offered are Interactive Live Online, which are taught for smaller class sizes of a maximum of 4 participants in order to really cultivate participants’ practice and help them personally. The other type of class is Live Online, which are classes open to up to 99 participants hoping to recreate the atmosphere of larger yoga studios.

Our beautiful tropical space was re-envisioned in new ways, bringing together the knowledge and passion of many, providing training opportunities and work to the people we employ, and putting into action the special recipe of everything we do into one central online platform.

>With a budget of close to zero, a hotel room has been reenvisioned into an online teaching studio, equipment used for retreat groups is now used to teach online, lights once used for spa services like facials have become our yoga studio lighting and an admin laptop has become a device to broadcast classes to the world.

Many hotel staff are now responsible for whole families who have lost jobs. To alleviate financial pressure, they were invited to stay in the empty hotel rooms. Medical and dental emergency financial support continued, along with health insurance payments.

“Of all the pivots we have done during the pandemic to survive, this was the one people suggested most consistently. Will they get behind it? It remains to be seen.”

Because of the value of community, and the impact that has on your physical and holistic yoga practice. Unity is fundamental to yoga and we have worked hard to recreate this for you online. The experience we are hoping to provide our students has been honed over months and months.

How to join:

Step 1) Buy class pass on the website
Step 2) Go to class schedule on website and book class of your choice
Step 3) Receive email welcome pack on how to attend 
Step 4) Join our Facebook group to join our global yoga community
Step 5) Keep turning up because yoga doesn’t take time – it gives time

Buy a class pass, join us on the mat. Classes start on Monday August 2nd, 2021. Taught from tropical Siem Reap, facilitated by a global team of teachers and supported by the Baby Elephant Group’s Cambodian staff.

We welcome you to join, as we plan to help you feel as if you’re traveling, as we salute the sun from a variety of locations including Angkor Wat in Siem Reap, and to develop Cambodian yoga teachers, and to help our Cambodian community recover from the pandemic.

10% of profits will be going to our emergency food fund to help the worst affected by the pandemic. 
Every time you join a class you will know you are helping people who need it. 

Contact: 
Ilana Tulloch or Camilla Valsecchi
hello@yogaspace.asia
+855 96747 0842 
Yoga Space Siem Reap 
https://yogaspace.asia