The Yoga Barn, Ubud, Bali

Despite being only three years and five months young at the time of writing, The Yoga Barn in the hill town of Ubud, Bali has established quite a reputation for itself throughout the local and international yoga community.

Nestled in amongst lush rice paddies, the studio itself is built in traditional style from Indonesian hardwoods, with polished wooden floors and rattan blinds that roll right up to the roof, totally opening up the studio to the warm tropical island breezes, giving you the sense that you are actually doing yoga in the rice paddies rather than just looking out at them!

KAFE – vegetarian and vegan cafe

Part of the family of Ubud enterprises founded by native New Yorker Megan Pappenheim and her Balinese husband Made Gunarta (including the vegetarian KAFE) The Yoga Barn was established to cater for the more spiritually inclined tourists that started coming to Bali after the 2002 bombing in Kuta.

Balispirit Website and Balispirit Festival

As their own personal response to this devastating event, Megan and Made started the Balispirit website in order to entice a different kind of tourist to the island. From the fertile ground of the website, the KAFE and the Yoga Barn, an exotic plant emerged that flowers spectacularly once a year – the BaliSpirit Festival. The festival is the celebratory arm of the Balispirit family – bringing people together from around the world to enjoy yoga, dance, music and spirituality in Ubud each March.

Dedicated Yoga Studio in Ubud

Yoga Barn co-founder Charley Patton came to Bali in 2004, met and became friends with Megan and Made and together they sowed the seeds for the first dedicated yoga studio in Ubud. The initial idea was more to build a community center than a yoga studio … a place where like-minded people could congregate to participate in celebrating LIFE. In 2005 they purchased some land just south of KAFE, and set about building the two storey yoga shala. Starting with two morning classes per day, the idea was ‘Build it and they shall come…’ and anyone who has visited a class at the studio can attest that yogis from all over the world have come in droves!

Fast forward to three years later, and The Yoga Barn has over fifty offerings per week across many modalities in addition to retreats, teacher trainings and special workshops. Charley notes that ‘All of this happened organically, as if the Universe kept opening doors for us to step through’.

With Ubud and Bali based teachers giving regular classes at the studio, The Yoga Barn also welcomes teachers from all around the world, who come to teach for differing periods, giving the studio a very international flavour. Apart from a whole range of yoga styles, from Hatha to Vinyasa Flow to Power and Restorative Yoga and everything in between, The Yoga Barn also runs Meditation classes, weekly Kirtan chanting, African Drumming workshops, Tibetan Bowls and Voice Awakenings, Monday night documentary film screenings in addition to several dance offerings. For more information, Make an Enquiry.