Have you ever breathed? I have, and I can say that nothing is the same since then. When I was suggested to write this article, I wanted to do it immediately. The main reason behind this is that I really want more people to “breathe”. Because yoga opens a channel to you, to your self through which you can breathe.
Our lives, your lives are full of endless, relentless matters and, maybe, problems. We have to-do lists which occupy every single day of ours. Living is now equal to catching up. It seems like we feel alive only when we catch up with something and put a check in the “done” box of our day planners.
Actually, there is nothing to feel strange about it. This is the method we learned; the method that we know quite well and has been taught to us since our childhood. This is the matter of “there are more goals to achieve, peaks to reach, money to earn”. When even all the bags we purchase, all those colourful clothes we wear and all those cities we travel around the world fail to fill the void inside us, we pursue something else. Maybe owing to this awareness, people have been more interested in methods like yoga in recent years.
A book which I have recently read made me feel once again what this hunger was about. In Forrest Carter’s book The Education of Little Tree, the grandmother tells her grandson that everybody has two kinds of mind; one is about the things required for the body to live (getting shelter, clothing, eating, etc.) and that there is another mind which is not related to such things at all and is called the spirit mind. Today this is referred to as spirit mind in a book, and in another day it can welcome you in a TV show in the way of the motto “follow your heart”, or in another day it can appear just in front of you in all its vividness in a yoga class.
Spirit mind is what gives us the capacity of grasping what is going on and who we are, not how we should be. It paves the way of getting to know ourselves through not only the body but also the harmony of spirit, mind and body. In other words, it is what gives us the chance to listen to our hearts rather than the endless requirements of the mind and our judgements. If you think of spirit mind as a muscle, yoga is a very effective tool to improve this muscle. When you make yoga a regular routine of your life, the change you undergo is actually learning how to breathe again.
Yoga does not make you rush, everything is at the necessary speed. As a matter of fact, nothing is necessary when it comes to yoga. You just have some time within the flow of yoga in all your individuality, at your own speed and without endeavouring to be better than others. Unfortunately, what we often do is to postpone sparing time for ourselves, for our bodies by using today’s fast lifestyle and living conditions as an excuse.
Nowadays business life is an integral part of our lives, and stress is an integral part of business life. It doesn’t matter whether your job is about drawing organisation charts, calculating costs or saving the world. What we need to realize is that if you give a 10-minute break, turn to yourself and “truly breathe” in that stressful environment, then you will remember yourself. And believe me, you will do what you are supposed to do in a more self-conscious manner. There are no fairies who can eliminate the stress for you, just like the fact that nobody else can breathe for you. However, yoga is one of the best teachers from whom you can learn how to do it. It’s up to you; you can laugh at what you read, turn off the screen and resume everything the way they were, or take a squint from the doorway to see if another life is possible (with your own method) J Namaste, (thank you).