From early morning meetings to late night research, from the children's school drop-off to 'good night and sweet dreams', little does the average working adult and homemaker think about bending the body or closing the eyes to explore the deepest and most profound aspects of who they are. Rather, yoga classes and meditation techniques are seen as the last recourse for physical or psychological issues, resorted to after long, desperate hours at the local gym or after a ridiculous number of medicated drugs have failed.
Yoga and meditation however, can have a drastic impact on one's day to day activities. I, for one, can vouch that before starting daily yoga practices, exhaustion would start showing up just before noon - and sometimes even earlier. After I began practicing yoga, my sleep quota reduced from 8 hours to 4 hours, and I was more effective throughout the day and into the night. Above all, there was an underlying sense of aliveness and ease in my daily routine.
However, when most people think of a "yoga program," they either slip off into day dreams featuring fantastic getaways to some yoga ashram in India, with foreign massage therapists and sparsely cooked "rabbit" foods; or conjure up a colorful image with rubber yoga mats, spandex exercise clothes, and a far too young yoga instructor whispering phrases of peace and bliss in-between impossible physical postures. This skewed impression of yoga in modern times is a distortion of a very deep and intricate science. The first yoga program, in fact, happened in a serene corner of the Himalayan Ranges known as Kanti Sarovar.
The yogic science finds its roots with Shiva, the Aadhi Yogi, or the first Yogi. Thousands of years ago, he transmitted the science of yoga to the Sapta Rishis - the renowned seven sages of the yogic lore. Since then, the yogic sciences have taken many shapes and forms, travelled to the west, and become distorted, far out of proportion.
Today, there are few places in the world where yoga and meditation are offered in their true essence. Though any number of yoga classes are held for physical wellbeing, very few are capable of transmitting yoga as the ancient sages once did. If more people could receive a yoga practice as it is meant to be given, the high levels of stress and pressures that the city life breeds could easily be resolved with new inner peace.
A center like Isha Yoga Center in India, for example, works to offer yoga as an experience from within, not as a manual of instructions. Headed by Isha Foundation, the center's aesthetics and mountainous surroundings support modern-day, stress-ridden individuals in taking a tranquil first step into the world of yoga and meditation.
Yoga programs today have taken on a distorted form. Isha yoga programs and the inner engineering retreats are a few programs which offer yoga and meditation in its true essence.
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