For all my adult life I’ve been fascinated by arts and artistic disciplines that originate in India. This love affair started after I first went to India at the age of 18. I travelled alone to meet a friend, but I ended up staying for 5 years. This wasn’t without breaks back to England, where I needed to renew my visa, but overall, my permanent address was Vrindavan, North India. What did I do during this time? I lived in an ashram (spiritual centre) with renunciates who had given up their jobs, families, and society to become devotees of Krishna, the cowherd boy deity whose beautiful stories or lila, dominate the religious and spiritual lives of Hindus living in that region of India. I studied religious texts. I spent most of my days visiting holy sites in the local area or performing what is known as parikrama, or the circumambulation of holy places. I discovered a layer of reality that exists above and beyond our ordinary lives, and through this, I realised that not only happiness, but bliss, is inherent in the self, or the soul. In fact, our physical life with all of its problems, is only a thin slice of what exists outside of it, in the entirety of material and spiritual existence.
Of course, it is easy to know this theoretically. It is even easy to experience it in the company of people whose lives have been dedicated to living that realisation, but outside of that spiritual environment, it is hard to maintain a constant knowing that we are in fact a soul temporarily occupying a body. How then do we develop spiritually, alone, and living in a society where so much seems to oppose being in a permanent state of internal peace and joy?
This is where yoga comes into the picture.
Once I was permanently living in England again, I started to practice Indian classical dance, or Bharata Natyam. It consumed my whole life, and I was happy for it to do so. After several years, I started to teach. It taught me not only how to move my body with grace and control, but also how to manage exertion, have self-discipline and to do these things with the spiritually oriented focus of dancing to lilas of various Gods and Goddesses associated with what is more broadly known as Hinduism. The problem was that I unknowingly had a basic issue with posture, caused by hypermobility in my spine and high arches in my feet, and eventually, my knees began to hurt all of the time. I had to leave dancing, which still saddens me to this day, but this is when yoga – something I’d been told to do to support the rigors of dance – became more than an occasional interest. One day, without much forethought, I decided to do my 200-hour initial teacher training.
I quickly realised that yoga as a physical and spiritual practice is nothing short of life changing. On a physical level, it strengthened me, helped with posture, and even mostly repaired the damage to my knees. I observed that as a discipline coming from the same tradition as Indian dance – something I’d love to explore more in future – I could use the physical and technical principles of that and apply easily apply them to yoga asana (postures). Above and beyond this, I discovered that the eightfold (ashtanga) process of the yoga path (not to be confused with Ashtanga Vinyasa) was a complete map for how to live life in the most effective way for creating happiness and well-being. This is why I have created my website. To share with you whatever I have understood or learned so far on the ever-unfolding journey of yoga. Finally, I am deeply grateful to all my teachers, past and present. Without them, I would know nothing at all about this life-affirming practice that I hope to share with you all in the hope that you might also find inspiration and through this, draw closer to your true spiritual identity.
With love and respect
Indulekha
Comments