Pure Yoga teacher Patrick Creelman opens up about his spiritual journey from Canada to Hong Kong

Uptown girl, downtown man My father was a work­ing-class boy and my mother an upper-class girl. It was a real class collision when they met in Ontario, Canada. They were 24 or 25. My father was one of the real advertising Mad Men of the 1960s, drinking and smoking. My mum preferred the slopes and was a ski instructor in Aspen, Colorado, and Yosemite Valley, California. Actors like Rock Hudson and Shirley Temple hired her to teach them how to ski.

My parents both loved the mountains and decided to relocate to British Columbia in 1970, once they were married. I was born three years later, on February 19, 1973. I’m so grateful they moved there because I grew up in the mountains and by the ocean. My sister, who is two years older than me, and I went to school in Vancouver, and when we weren’t in school, we were in Whistler, skiing and hiking.

I did go through some dark times growing up, like we all do. When I was 15 or 16 and in high school, my mum’s brother gave me some cassettes and told me to play them. They contained lectures by the American spiritual teacher Ram Dass. So there I was driving around in my first car, a 1973 Datsun 510, listening to them. My friends were like, “What the hell is this?” But as soon as I put the tapes on, all my anxiety disappeared. My sister has a spiritual bent and I read my first book on yoga thanks to her. I didn’t realise that the lectures and those books were shaping my mind.

Bonjour world The dark times passed and I made it through high school. I was 19 and wasn’t sure what to do next. My mum offered to send me to France for a year to study the humanities (Renaissance art, music, history, European politics) at a college in Villefranche-sur-Mer, in the south of France. It was my own personal renaissance. I heard music I’d never heard before. Saw art for the first time with my own eyes. And then there were the houses with small doors and little cars. It opened my eyes and my spirit for life. It awakened in me the need for adventure.

The university of life I only made it through two years of my undergraduate biology degree at Simon Fraser Uni­ver­sity, in British Columbia. I’d wanted to become either a wildlife biologist or a conservationist but my hunger for adventure kept taking me off to different places. I soon realised I wanted something other than formal education, something more spiritual. I found it in the Arctic Circle, where I was working putting out forest fires. This was the first time I’d spent a large proportion of my time alone, and all the spiritual teachings of Ram Dass came back to me. I also started to explore yoga.

My next epic adventure saw me hitchhike from Canada, across Europe and down to Africa, before I ended up in Portugal. I was dead broke after being on the road for months and got a job working in a bar in Lisbon. It was 1998 and the beginning of emails. I got one from my uncle. All it said was “call home”. So I did, using a payphone. My mum told me my father had a brain tumour and was dying. He was 62. In that moment, I realised that life is what you make it and it doesn’t last forever.That call was when I officially grew up.