Now with the advent of social media, we as a world culture are learning on the fly how to live with a new toy (or weapon, you may call it), and life as we know it has forever changed. If ever there was a time when yogic philosophy proved useful to guide us from the disturbances of the mind and toward a peaceful existence, it is now.

In India, one of the world’s stalwart cultures, I find solace in many of the impermeable traditions and philosophies gathered around yoga. India’s yogic philosophy has directed and guided countless searchers, from the novice to the learned, who hope to make peace with that which brings us so much joy and pain: the ego.

The ego helps us achieve, but it also draws us into conflict and confusion; it plays a witty game with us until we somehow, if we are lucky, tame the beast. But how do we begin to understand what we’re up against? How do we shunt being a contestant in the game of life and simply contentedly live the game? Ageless, a wonderful new book by R. Sharath Jois with Isha Singh Sawhney, is a good place to begin.

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Jois’s entire life has been steeped in the eight pillars of yoga, which he contends lead to an ageless life. Agelessness is not simply defined by time but, by “giving ourselves the chance to live a longer, more satisfied, happier life”, we can be ageless, he says.

With ease and adaptability, Ageless makes Jois’s practices accessible for all who care to live a better quality of life. The book covers physical care, mental care, and care for others, with space allotted for 10 asanas in step-by-step form, which Jois states is all you really need.

The first part of the book largely covers diet. In India, food has been a science for millennia. When you enter the world of modern yoga, half of one’s time can be spent simply understanding the fuel needed (and not needed) for our humanly vehicles.

Jois lays out how the Vedas, the guiding texts to Hinduism, say that eating too much ultimately can lead to sickness and disease. The body really doesn’t need too much food after all. In this context, we can be “frugal” with food for wiser reasons than to look skinny. Fasting for one day out of the month can be done not because you are going to the beach the next day, but because it’s tendered through a grounding spiritual base.

Related: Sharath Jois on Balancing the Body for a Stable Mind

Jois addresses emotional and mental health throughout the book, starting with cultivating a positive outlook. He proffers that while there is a great need to support ourselves and our families and to be productive, “perhaps taking time out to play an instrument, write, paint, cook, mediate, exercise, or practice Ashtanga yoga is all one needs to come back to the daily grind refreshed and with a more optimistic outlook.”

“We all live by deadlines and place a lot of stress on ourselves to achieve what we think are ‘perfect lives,’” he says. In doing so, we inadvertently crave negative things and thus bring negativity. But when we do something joyful, a natural instinctive positivity arises to face our problems. That mindset is far different from the one that generally causes problems and is essential for mental well being. A yogic practice can further help this by creating a calm state of being and lowering the burden on our mind and body.

But the most inspiring portion of the book is Jois’s simple codifying of the act of seva, or service, which is performed without any thought of reward or repayment. “Being ageless is intricately intertwined with selflessness,” Jois states. There is seva for yourself, seva for nature (the physical environment), seva for country, and seva for community. “A real yogi shares money and knowledge,” Jois says. “A real yogi considers everyone equal.”

If every corner of the world imported this type of approach to equality, I wonder if we would see less suffering? To honor and respect oneself and others and to serve humanity is the essence of being not only ageless but also of transcendent. And that is the real crux of the book.

The post How Yoga Can Lead to a Longer, More Satisfying, and Happier Life appeared first on Sonima.

We all want to know the secrets to a successful career, and my former boss, a self-made billionaire, later became the mayor of New York, transforming for better what was already one of the country’s most beloved and visited cities. Now, once again, I have the good fortune of knowing another high-profile success story whose rightful owner has decided to share his philosophies on life and the art of living in his new book, Ageless: A Yogi’s Secrets To A Long And Healthy Life.

The core difference between the two book authors is that in India, from where Sharath Jois, author of Ageless, hails, philosophies are not merely claimed as one’s own. They are credited to a time-tested culture that has evolved over thousands of years and that contain the learned pillars for human contentment.

However, philosophies are nothing if not put into practice and this is the key to discovering and learning from any person’s story. What has been their unique experience that has led them to where they are now and why we would trust them or spend our precious time reading what they have to say?

I’ve had the good fortune of knowing and studying with Sharath Jois for 15 years and my biggest take-away is that he has lived a unique life. I know no one who has his extraordinary family experience, his formative years surrounded by doting and admiring foreigners, young seekers who explored the other side of the world for answers, and becoming a person unscathed by the ego’s temptations. Last week, this former Wall Street rube, the young woman who yearned for knowledge, once again became consumed with interest in yet another boss’s book, Ageless.

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Sharath Jois, or Sharathji, as Indians comfortably say to show respect, is not my boss—although some students outside of practice like using that moniker for him in an endearing way—but I found he shares at least one quality that my other New York City boss has: Taking their inherent gifts and doing something more, something that is not founded in accomplishment strictly, but in giving, offering, and transforming something we now know into something better.

Related: Be sure to bring your copy of Ageless to Sharath Jois’ 2019 U.S. Tour (check out the dates and locations here) to have it signed by the author in person!

Attuned to their surroundings, these stories come from the heart of humanity. They are not strategized but rather flow from a natural source of conscious material. In fact, what is consciousness itself if not the clarity to see the truth without the ego’s cluttering? Sharathji’s book will undoubtedly inspire many to make those slight adjustments needed on the yogic path, so that we may all gravitate to the selfless, conscious, pure in nature beings that we all are.

>>Order your paperback of Ageless: A Yogi’s Secrets To A Long And Healthy Life on Amazon today!

The post Sharath’s New Book, <i>Ageless</i>, Is a Timeless Take on Approaching Life with Vision appeared first on Sonima.

Nothing snapped, nothing tweaked, nothing I did out of the ordinary could be traced back to why my back began to act up. Hot to the touch, right above my iliac sacrum, overnight I couldn’t bend forward or backward without serious suffering. Staying in Mysore, India at the time and practicing yoga, which has been a normal routine of mine for over a decade, I engaged in a series of Ayurvedic treatments, but they didn’t make a dent in alleviating the pain.

As a former lawyer, I’d read countless medical malpractice depositions involving back surgeries that went wrong and had an appreciation that back problems had a high potential for serious longterm quality of life issues. The takeaway was to avoid any knife to my back, and so from the beginning, I knew I had to understand what was going on from a holistic point of view.

Continual questioning did not make the matter any better. My once-invincible yoga practice was now forever altered. I say that tongue-in-cheek, but the realization and process to physical downshifting overnight is to have a source of enjoyment be largely compromised. That news is never good. While I still had overall good health and all the good fortunes that I could be grateful for, the transition into attending to my back as a limitation (instead of a bendy thing of joy) had to be done with measure and calm. So I did what any modern human does, I took to the Internet.

Good grief. The more I read about the back, spine, L5s and S1s, the more pictures and diagrams and videos that I viewed, the more vertigo I got. The body is truly a code I can’t crack. Even most doctors can’t crack the back, and when reminded of my early legal beagle days and the harrowing back hacking that I read about in the medical malpractice depositions, a level of abject confusion overcame all noble intentions.

It crossed my mind a few times to blame the pain on something other than my physical limitations, and so, in these moments, the villain became yoga itself.

Never mind that up until the point of back arrest, I was still doing aggressive bending, grabbing my calves, sometimes a little higher up my leg, as I approached my fifth decade on this earth. Any rational person would tell you that’s simply unwise at that age, perhaps even reading this, you want to look away, like one would passing a car wreck on the highway. But so far, my body had played nicely and now I had to face that age could be a factor.

So I retreated. I did what I thought was the responsible thing and stopped attempting any pose that required the slightest bend. For five months, I laid off, yet my back didn’t get any better. In the mornings, I couldn’t get out of bed without pain; I bent down to pick up my shoes like an octogenarian, and the simple act of laughing, sneezing or coughing came with a thundering crash of lightning around the sway of my back that felt like an electrical jolt.

My MRI didn’t show anything that was near equal to the pain that I was experiencing: a slight disc bulge and some arthritis. But the torment that I felt seemed as though the spine had been cemented and then bulldozed. My doctor said never to do that when I showed him a picture of kapotasana, a deep backbend pose. Yet, strangely, my desire to return to that pose was one of the things that eventually healed me the most. Of course, it didn’t happen over night.

Related: Can You Be Too Flexible? Hypermobility, Explained

Edging into the dark behavior of disregarding my pain with what the doctor said to avoid happened incrementally, mostly due to fear and hyper-vigilance to avoid additional pain. Yet, in kapotasana, as I bent backwards and pushed through the pain, the remarkable result was that afterwards, it didn’t create more pain. In fact, it felt better. Not a lot better, but there was some relief the more I did the pose. This led me down another avenue of research. No longer did I back off of poses that I had previously steered clear of. They were not pain-free, but they were definitely, and inexplicably, minimizing the overall agony.

This new phase of empirical research arrived on the beginning of a different trip to India working with my teacher, R. Sharath Jois. Sharathji’s studied, careful assists in back bending allowed me to feel completely safe. As I released my fears, I drifted backwards as he placed my hands on my ankles through what had previously been an impossible proposition. When I left these practice days and did not suffer the same amount of pain, this spoke loudly: The back did not need to be shuttered.

Working with Sharathji gave me the confidence to hear and heal my body. Soon, I was no longer inadvertently adding to the stiffness, but working with what I had to re-engage that muscle movement that had been eschewed due to fear. In fact, laying off did nothing positive for my physical condition. By re-engaging, my pain had minimized by perhaps 10 to 20 percent, but the important note directed me down a different path of research: the mind.

When I was growing up, a neighbor down the street had a father who had a “nervous breakdown,” whatever that hushed term meant exactly. That was some time in the 70s and then, in the 80s, it seemed that no one talked about breakdowns anymore. Adults and people on television complained about ulcers, which didn’t carry a stigma and, therefore, had a higher acceptable decimal level and healthier national discussions around relief ensued, like better diets and exercise. In the 90s and onwards, people talked less about ulcers mainly because pharmaceuticals were zapping them to bits, but unfortunately, stress has never been completely eradicated. In fact, modern medicine has yet to dominate the will of the human body.

When we experience stress, the body will absorb it and find an outlet of some sort, be that a skin condition, through the gastrointestinal track, to depressing the mind, to list a few. No matter how hard we try, if stress remains, it will morph into and appear in different physical forms, leaving sufferers and the medical profession to shift into, and away from, evolving remedies and placating techniques, like fashion trends.

The ingenuity of ridding stress from our everyday life has exploded into a profitable industry of stress reducing diets, lifestyles, teas, exercises, books, spas, body oils, you name it. Though I was too young to have brushes with nervous breakdowns or ulcers, I have had IBS, or irritable bowel syndrome, which is most likely a descendent of the ulcer, as it deals with inexplicable digestive issues. Not to mention, I’ve experienced back pain that does not equal the register of results found on an MRI; mysterious aches and pains, I’m now convinced were stress-related. Ultimately, I figured whatever attempts I made to rid the body of stress, the body had the last word.

Related: The Simple Solution to End Chronic Pain

Unbeknownst to me, this budding hypothesis came prepackaged and delivered on a plate following a dinner with New York friends who have high-stress professions. They told me about the late John Sarno, MD, a professor of Rehabilitation Medicine at New York University School of Medicine and physician who diagnosed “tension myositis syndrome” (TMS), a psychosomatic illness which caused chronic back, neck and limb pain.

During his nearly 50-year-career at NYU, Sarno’s mission was to educate patients on the psychological and emotional aspects of their pain and symptoms, which are an unconscious “distraction” that represses unconscious emotional issues. Sarno believed that the mind will try to repress emotions that the unconscious can’t, thus, funneling pain to the physical body. When the stress is seen as what it is, the symptoms serve no purpose and (miraculously) go away. It’s like a sneaky deal the body makes with the mind.

On a long plane ride home from London to LA, I read Sarno’s book Mind Over Back Pain and decided to test out some of his theories. Namely, I talked to my body differently. For example, I decided that when I coughed, I wouldn’t wince in pain. Miraculously, the pain went away. Similarly, I had been bending over in a protective stance and stopped doing that. These tricks were attempted and preformed successfully in one go. There was no doubt that my back pain was partly, if not mostly, due to some emotional pain that I was experiencing at the time.

Yoga as the villain did not last long either—although, would I have had the back problems if I didn’t do crazy backbends? I can’t answer that but I do know that the remedy was to not fear pain serving as a distractor and not add tension. The moment that I understood how to communicate with my body and how to value or discard certain tension causing thoughts, the pain lessened.

Two years later, I continue to feel tightness in my back, but on a scale of one to 10, it’s a one, whereas before it was a nine. I can live with a one, and I continue to work in the fashion Sarno wisely advocated. I also take care to live a balanced, low-stress life when possible and try not to hold onto tension. Mostly, stress cannot be avoided for me right now as I’m not a fully realized person, but I do hope that my research on this earth continues to lend itself to breakthroughs.

Yoga and bending backwards has led me down an unimaginable series of questions and answers. Working through the pain got me to the other side, and now my back is again more flexible. Age is another inevitable kink. How long can the back reverse its course away from gravity’s pull forward? I have no idea, but the combo platter of choice seems to be understanding where insidious stress hides in the body and not be an age denier. Somewhere in the middle is a full-meal deal where my body is stretched and strengthened and stress sustained and maintained as best as it can.

The spirit is undeniably strong and despite the common phrase “mind over matter,” in the long run, the mind does not triumph over body, but the indomitable spirit can. When we continue to do what we love and do it with care and consciousness, avoiding traps of fear by listening to the body, we can minimize creating a cycle of tension and fear.

The post My Life As an Ashtanga Student in Mysore: Healing Back Pain with Yoga appeared first on Sonima.

What had transpired was a Category 4 hurricane, super-sized from man-made overbuilding and poor environmental protections, making landfall deep in the heart of Texas. For almost three weeks, non-stop, I along with my partner, friends, and volunteers from local churches, stripped the house to its bare minimum: roof, struts, slab floor. I had a general sense of ache and fatigue, partly due to the lack of sleep and any real nourishment. This, along with an incomprehensible amount of worry and grief, were petty complaints and luxuries that I could not afford—not with my 81-year-old father walking around in a daze through the eight-foot-tall trash pile looking at the remnants of his life. Everything he had known for the past 30 years, upended by four-feet of flood waters.

On the daily 40-mile drive from the flood zone to our hotel, we cut through war-like scenes of destruction, rubble piled high, trees ripped and torn, homes tattooed with high water marks, and the stench of swamp. To tune out the bad commercial radio, I entered a post-apocalyptic game with myself. I told myself that after the storm I could choose from two fantasy gifts. One was impractical for my budget and mostly fear-based: a brand new Range Rover, which I’d never considered buying before the hurricane, but I was looking for armor, something that was strong and, as I tried to convince myself, impervious to destructive weather forces. The other was more in line with my lifestyle: 10 days at an Ayurvedic clinic in India to re-balance my body after all this stress. I’d been practicing yoga on a fairly deep level for the past 15 years, so I knew to park the Range Rover option, and book India.

Four months later, I checked into Vaidyagrama, a “true healing village,” a tag line plainly stated on their website, and, as I came to learn, a fitting description, indeed. For it does take a village to recuperate—it might take even a whole city, nation, or world—but I’m getting far ahead of myself.

Day one, I was met by one of the vaidyas, or Ayurvedic physicians, who share a common vision to healing. He was a gentle, middle-aged man who approached me with a warm smile. In his average English, from the start, he told me about one simple concept: the spiritual heart. We have a material heart and we care for this, but we also have a spiritual heart and we must care for it, he said. Mind you, if I’d heard it from anyone else, at any other time, it would not have been felt so viscerally, but I understood instinctively that this healer was sincere and that I had entered an authentic place. He believed what he was speaking and it came from an incontrovertible place in his soul. In a weird way, it felt similar to the feeling of care a parent gives when treating a sick child.

Ayurvedic medicine is not simply an Eastern medical profession, it is a way of life. Many people who take its teachings inside of India oftentimes do so from a family elder who passes the knowledge down like his or her elder before. It continues this way naturally from generation-to-generation. This has been curious to me because that chain doesn’t exist in the modern world of higher education or in many professions. Most Western doctors and nurses handle complex obstacles, such as disease and trauma as well as perform surgical operations that require a far different set of skills. Ayurveda, in contrast, seeks to care for the individual by employing preventative measures of self-care so that the body and mind stay in harmony with the environment, thus cultivating stronger and longer health.

It takes energy to deconstruct care, how we are to be cared for, and how we are to accept care. This felt impossible to do when I arrived in India so depleted. I’d voluntarily checked myself into an Ayurvedic hospital to recuperate, but after the doctor left my room, I found myself questioning my decision to come to a hospital at all. I was perfectly fine, right? Nothing was actually wrong with me, I reminded myself. I suffered from no disease or life-threatening ailment. I had taken a harrowing highway drive from the Coimbature airport to outside of town through dry and dusty India and had arrived at a modest and mellow place of healing, yet somehow it was all making me self-conscious. Had I been at a Western spa, or at a resort, the structure of my material self would have been firmly in place, if not feeling ever more special for the luxe stay; yet, I knew being pampered was somehow anathema to what I needed.

Related: Ayurveda’s Approach to Mental Health

My spirit was still dampened by thoughts of things of which I had no control, like the overdevelopment around Houston and building on marshes that should have been protected natural areas, and flooded with unimaginable responsibilities, like relocating my dad’s life. I thought about my spiritual heart and concluded that if I didn’t care for it, the body would bend to that course of bad health that I did not want.

The doctor put me on a regime of rest, a strict diet and medicinal massages, and I was told to slow down and not think about anything stressful. I quickly came to terms with the natural path to unwinding, and stuck to my instincts of choosing this Ayurvedic hospital in an effort to eradicate the trauma, and deconstruct so that I could move on.

For the first five days, each morning an hour after breakfast, I had a treatment called abhyangam, or oil massage, and dhanyamla dhara, which is pouring a fermented medicinal oil preparation onto the skin. Two young women in matching green colored bibs and billowy pants smoothed and rubbed medicinal oil into my skin while I laid on a hand-carved, thick wood table, or droni, made from a single piece of neem tree, used for its medicinal qualities. The oil was thick and smelled fragrant, like the moist soil of a forest mixed with sweet smelling blooming vines.

Speaking very little English, the girls rubbed oil into my scalp in a frenetic motion akin to scrubbing a stain out of cloth, and the same way I had seen women in India do with their children after bathing in the river. They then applied the oil to my body, lifting my arms, repositioning and scooting me along the droni, side-to-side, as needed. At first, the jostling made me feel like a rag doll, but the young women seemed to handle me the only way they knew how. It was the same way their moms handled them, and this went back generations. It’s peculiar to have a complete stranger, half your age, “mother” you in any way, but Mother India is a cultural phenomenon that has many teachings—and this was one. For most of our lives, unless or until we become an enlightened being, and regardless of how independent and successful we are as an adult, to be deeply cared for and healed takes another human being, an independent energy apart from ourselves, whether someone closely related, or someone we just met, like these young women and doctors.

After I showered off the residual oil, on the way back to my room, the girls pointed to the garden around the corner where the center grew its own herbs. In fact, each plant and tree on the premises was intentionally grown for a healing purpose. Knowing that the environment had been purposefully conceived rested peacefully on my conscious. The food they provided had also been harvested from their gardens as well as the tinctures I drank before the simple meals of rice, vegetables, sometimes a rasam, always a chapatti.

For the hour in between treatments and before lunch, I retreated to the built-in bed outside of my room on the patio draped in swaying bamboo chick blinds and closed my eyes. Under the cool wind of the ceiling fan, powered through energy conservation techniques, I was in a complete state of relaxation listening to the birds chirping, and the soft singsong of Tamil and Malayalam, the local languages spoken by the people walking to and fro down the thatched bamboo covered hallways. Each day that I returned to the patio, I felt more in equilibrium with myself and my environment.

In the mornings, I also attended the powerful and lovely pujas, and chanting. Finding time to show gratefulness to a higher power helped me feel connected to something other than the self. However, by the second week, I had become so lazy that striving beyond eating and sleeping was pointless. In the mornings and evenings, I stuck to my meditation schedule, which was easy under the circumstances, and because I’m not as disciplined as I’d like to be, in the afternoons, I lumbered over to the community space for some legal wifi, 30 minutes. As much as possible, I didn’t cruise through emails, social media sites, or memories of the flooded house, because it was irrelevant for this stay. Also, not conducting regular life like planning outfits and social occasions, doing errands, or paying bills created the time needed to indulge in a whole lot of nothingness. My job was to eat, receive treatments, bathe, become supine, watch birds flitter by, monitor mosquitos, and listen to the leaves rattled by a welcomed breeze.

Related: My Life As an Ashtanga Student in Mysore: The Essence of Seeking Consciousness

For the remaining five days, the doctor prescribed elakizhi, which is the lightly pounding of hot boluses stuffed with a poultice of inflammation reducing leaves, grated coconut, lemon, turmeric, rock salt and other herbs. This treatment dates back thousands of years, and was originally used for treating warriors home from battle. Trust me, after elakizhi, you don’t need more than the underbelly of a ceiling fan to entertain. Though the treatment may be referred to as a massage, it is far different from let’s say a Swedish or Thai massage. Mostly, Ayurvedic massage is to rub or, when doing elakizhi, pound natural herbs into the skin; it is not primarily for relaxation during the treatment. Although zoning out could be a natural byproduct of the treatment, along with any other hosts of occurrences that results from releasing toxins, it is mostly to rebalance the internal elements of our system that have become out of whack. In Ayurveda, these elements are defined by the five earth elements—fire (agni), water (jala), air (vayu), earth (prithvi), and ether (akash)—and, in turn, are represented by three groups, or doshas—vata, pitta and kapha—that connect the language of Ayurveda to symptoms of illness or pain as well as to our physical state of being for diagnosis.

Maybe I wasn’t suppose to use my brain too much, but I found, as my body and mind relaxed, surrounded in a supporting, environmentally conscious space, a sense of energy from an interior point so far inside my body that it could have been the back of, the beginning, or the base of my spiritual heart—which is what for me discovery feels like—and I knew something serious was transpiring.

Looking back over my life, I realized, my deep healing needs had always come from those experiences that fall on the furthest point of the spectrum, the hottest fire, the darkest night, the coldest heart, but it really shouldn’t be that way and Ayurveda told me so: It’s the moderation, the prevention, the care and love that we give to ourselves, daily, moment-by-moment, from where health’s true balance is found. One doesn’t need a natural disaster to happen to learn how to deeply care for ourselves, but, apparently, I did. It was critical to understand this lesson because our culture teaches us independence and fortitude. It says, if and when we find ourselves in need of help, we can’t accept it, because you don’t really need anyone. Warning: This is a trap. The more you buy into this lie, the harder it is to break down your own resistance to true self-care, which, actually, involves others (sometimes strangers).

Today, my dad is in pretty good physical health, he has a great sense of humor and lives in the present, but mostly he doesn’t remember the hurricane and I have to remind him why he’s not able to live at home. As a family member, I did my duty. I think anyone in my position would do the same, but when some karma comes knocking on your door, and it doesn’t look pretty, brace yourself, and do what you’re called upon to do, like Krishna points out to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. Arjuna is a warrior whether he likes it or not, Krishna says. So we must do our dharma, whatever that my be, but if I could be so bold as to suggest, consider tacking on a trip to an Ayurvedic clinic for as long as you can after the war.

Photography by Leslie Hendry

The post The Healing Power of Self-Care Through Ayurveda appeared first on Sonima.

In India, temples are ubiquitous odes to Hindu deities and can been found in front of homes, outside stores, at street intersections, on hilltops, circling roundabouts, embodied in a peepal tree, or just about anywhere; all contain a palpable pulse, and if I were God, I’d surely come a knocking here.

Never do I tire of this culture because parts have proven to be so much wiser than the comparatively young culture that I grew up in the U.S. India’s deep roots run like tunnels to the core of civilization and humanity. Over several trips, I’ve become an Indophile and the biggest take away from that is that there’s zero chance I’ll ever be bored on this earth again.

Over my adult life, having lost the appetite to identify with a particular religion, I oddly find myself in India in the early mornings or late afternoons kicking off my chappals, or sandals, parking them alongside a waist-high wall of fat, vertically painted stripes in alternating red and white, and entering a temple. My feet make contact with the dusty ground and, in high spirit, I ditch my Western suspicion that someone might be tempted to abscond with my $22 Havaianas. I bend down and respectfully touch the floor of the temple doorway to transcend, if only for mere moments, my normal, born into this world, self.

Perhaps that’s why we travel, or leave our fated life, to transcend. I certainly hope so, at least it’s a gateway. For if to transcend is to find a state of complete mental quietude, or silence, then we must plow through the chatter, or those elements which both attract and disturb our otherwise pure consciousness of the self, cosmic consciousness, the one that is the all, the atman, the internal principle which is also the mighty universal Brahman.

In the early aughts, I made a deal with my professional self that I may not ever make as much money as I made then as an expat lawyer working in a media company, but I promised to follow my interests and explore the corners of this life, near and far, internal and external.

Up to then, I’d steamrolled over aspects of who I was, or would have been, choosing a trade and a profession that would make me good money, if not great money, and along the way protect me from certain things that I feared, like being an abject failure. Money is not only quantitative and incontrovertible, but, today, money is a value set that supersedes almost everything: honesty, beauty, respect, dignity, for if you have a lot of it, there will always be someone willing to look the other way, complicit in fulfilling whatever desire that money was meant to fulfill or rationalize, muddying the path of discovering who we really are.

Related: Why Money (and Other Things) Can’t Buy Happiness

The one thing that money cannot supplant is consciousness. Consciousness is an elusive, wandering, element of existence that some humans, a fraction I’d say, have been toiling over, exploring its possibilities since time immemorial. In some respects, it’s a marker of humanity’s own peaks and valleys, our highs and lows.

Before I set over the cliff and left my job, along with the status, respect, money and position that it afforded me, I mostly promised to my deal-making self—the risk-taker, the explorer/adventurer, the seeker of liberation—that I wouldn’t pursue an interest unless I wholeheartedly believed it was my calling; that is if I could help it.

It hasn’t been easy, but by renouncing certain fundamental Western tenets, I’ve shed layers of errant desires and expectations. Yoga came to me as a solution to recovery following foot surgery, elective surgery to fix my feet, deformed from trying to physically reach a higher height in heels. (Funny that my shod of choice was my Achilles heel to being a professional.)

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Once my physical body got the blast of what it was like to feel really good again, I couldn’t help but follow that interest in a most wholehearted fashion. Lucky for me, it came packaged in philosophical texts on how to be human.

Those of you reading, who have also sipped from this cup, know it’s pretty powerful. It’s what has drawn me to invest this tranche of my life in yoga. It’s what makes me return to my choice of India’s simple accommodations, in search for the mental luxuries of self-exploration. It’s what allows me to ogle at arched leafy treetops, tall bobble-headed palm trees, miracle-inspired sunsets, low-rising full moon encounters. It’s what gives me joy in sipping chai with friends, loafing around after lunch, digesting food, humor and talk. It’s what allows me to rise early to touch my toes or put my leg behind my head, because it stretches my limbs and oils the engine to the vehicle that I’m hermetically sealed in for my material life. Oh to feel good!

It took a long time to realize I had jettisoned much of what I’d constructed consciously and subconsciously, and to understand the force driving this deal. All I knew was that my future, my life, seemed to be the future, and life, of someone else’s, who I didn’t know and who I didn’t want to know. I was simply mimicking someone else’s steps.

Related: My Life as an Ashtanga Student in Mysore: Heard on “The Yoga Trail”

Looking back, I still don’t know how I found the courage to abandon a career in law, renounce the edifice that I had built. But I knew I had to deconstruct and cobble together what was right for me for this lifetime.

Consciousness, I’m guessing, can be found just about anywhere. I happen to feel closer to it in India’s temples, something that tickles my fancy, inspires my interests, helps me find that equanimity of being fully at home in my body and ego, with all its humanly characteristics, doing the best I can do. Trips to India help to fill in the blanks to numerous questions I have about consciousness, but not in the way I might’ve expected. I cannot, and will not, attest to sudden life changing moments or an epiphany, or a religious overtaking. I will admit to clearer thinking, more patience, fewer reactions, and attributing contentment to continuing to go beyond what I know as me.

Photography by Steve Lawrence

The post My Life As an Ashtanga Student in Mysore: The Essence of Seeking Consciousness appeared first on Sonima.

Once in the Bay area, I scouted for my Uber among a throng of car-lift expectants―at least six people deep on the curb―staring into their smart phones. This was worlds away from the post-Communistic island where cars are from the 1950s and testy wifi is sold in forms of perforated cards with long alphanumeric names and passwords by hot spot gangster types on the street. Their hushed-toned solicitations normally reserved for illicit substances intended for mental escape, which is maybe the function of the Internet at times anyway.

No matter where you go, traveling tends to illustrate the world’s contradictions and imbalances. Absorbing San Francisco airport’s exalted tech scene, I told myself that in the future the stark disparities of Havana and San Francisco would somehow be ameliorated by benign, caring, intelligent, and selfless world leadership that included access to both technology and true democracy. However, inside I knew I probably couldn’t count on that. So like a homing pigeon somewhere in the middle of these two worlds, I returned to a sense of place that I’ve come to depend on: My yoga practice.

Wherever Sharath-ji goes, the yoga comes. In Stanford University’s gymnasium, I joined more than 200 Ashtanga yoga practitioners in rolling out our mats. We were a spreadsheet of rows and columns following a formula, a well constructed method, of led primary uniformity, lifting our arms, stepping our feet forward and then backward, pushing and pressing limbs, bending and stretching, focusing and always trying to source the elusive bandhas. I felt incredibly grateful to be here under the sounds of Sharath’s Sanskrit count. All else was quiet tranquility save for the inhales, exhales, hidden nerves, and heart pumping adrenaline.

After two days of challenging led intermediate classes, the nerves had dissolved into the other fun stuff of Sharath’s tours: Seeing old acquaintances and friends, meeting new practitioners, chatting over coffee and organic food, and cruising Palo Alto, where the future is being created and revealed in the surrounding tech campuses. Rolling down the car window the air is fresh and smells of star jasmine and roses. Under crisp blue California skies, I recall Cuba’s pristine countryside, stuck in time, uncluttered by commercial billboards, only consistent doses of primitive looking government propaganda.

Related: Sharath Jois Visits Stanford: See the Photos!

The excitement of travel and discovery hadn’t yet faded, but the excess energy that I had brought with me to the tour had turned a tranquil corner. Traveling broadens our perspectives. Perhaps it leads to a better understanding of the world and, thus, a richer, fuller existence. Traveling also returns us home to help us appreciate what we have. This is also what my practice does for me. This is why I always come back to it without debate. My body and mind form some congressional pact for the benefit of the corporeal and spiritual well-being. It happens when I self practice, but not to the degree it does in a large room with hundreds of other aspirants under Sharath’s guidance.

We gather around Sharath for conference. He says that yoga is timeless. That rishis have been doing yoga for millennia to clear their minds. My mind wanders back to the Cubans, their old cars, the dilapidated buildings, neurosurgeons earning the equivalent of two dollars a day. For most Cubans, travel isn’t an option. Most are land-locked buoyed by a distant revolution.

Sharath asks us why we practice yoga. Yoga is for our well-being, he says. It seems both simple and obvious, yet, oftentimes, so out of reach. I wonder how our humanity and our governments have gotten so far off this message. I imagined a world spawned from a new revolution, one that starts with demanding well-being for all that is timeless, that doesn’t greedily consume technology and resources, but distributes those, freely, equitably and not for mental escape, but for clarity and consciousness.

I look around at the practitioners in the room who have taken a moment from their demanding, busy lives to prioritize their well-being, and, ultimately, the well-being of everyone as it’s not something that exists in a vacuum. We all benefit from the well-being of others. I’m glad I’m here among this sentient group. I’m thankful for their sensibilities and intelligence and for those of my guru. He puts his hands in Namaste, thanks us for coming, and I think: I want a yoga revolution.

>>Don’t miss your chance to practice with Paramaguru Sharath Jois on his U.S. Tour. Workshops and drop-in classes are still available in UCLA (May 16 to 21) and NYC (May 26 to 31). Sign up now! 

Photography By Danielle Tsi 

The post Sharath Jois U.S. Tour Report: A Journey to Stanford to Start a Yoga Revolution appeared first on Sonima.

Like a toddler entering his or her terrible twos, I’ll admit I too looked for recognition of the child-like things I could do, such as touching my toes, bending backwards, and swinging my leg behind my head. I had no one with whom to share the immense satisfaction I felt for accomplishing things that I never dreamt I could do as a 38-year-old New York lawyer. No proud parents lived nearby to admire my yogic feats. My boss could care less. My friends were raising their kids and wanted to hear nothing about me turning upside down. They had nice houses and good careers. And here I was, rolling around on the ground in garbha pindasana looking like Humpty Dumpty just cracked her head. The joy I felt physically was a manifestation of what was happening inside. In some ways, asana was a trick to show me how to observe the parallel process of what was happening beneath the surface of physical asana.

When I arrived in Mysore, India to practice at the renown Sri K. Pattabhi Jois Yoga Institute (KPJAYI), my callow desire to show-and-tell was quickly usurped by nerves. In morning practice, I found my physical strengths and limitations within the shala walls that seemed to sweat and breathe like living beings. In the afternoons, I humbly discovered my endless enthusiasm for the Yoga Sutras of which I knew very little about. There was a completely different approach to life based on an ancient philosophy that was deeply rooted in one of the oldest cultures on earth. I drew contrasts between my first stab at life and this unique opportunity to change directions. I gravitated hard toward the new syllabus.

Related: My Life as an Ashtanga Student in Mysore (Part 1)

This wasn’t an escape or holiday although it was also certainly not stressful living. I extracted myself from the real world as I knew it, and began to question what is real. For two months, I stayed in Mysore in a room without air conditioning, and sometimes without a window. I took baths using the same bucket I hand-washed my clothes, hoping I’d wrung out the mildew smell from earlier failed attempts. I tried to fall asleep at 7 p.m. despite the neighbor’s dog throwing a barking fit at midnight.

Over the next 12 years, I would make nine trips to Mysore. Sometimes, I brought work from home, which is its own form of consistency and discovery. I haven’t completely eschewed the Western world nor do I plan to. I always had a return flight home to LA, where I pay rent, own a car, and enjoy my “real” life. Whenever I visit Mysore, however, for those two months, I allow time to understand my personal dharma and duty. On these trips, I’ve sought out every class offering that is remotely associated with yoga, including philosophy, meditation, sutras, chanting, anatomy, painting, singing, Sanskrit, music, Vedic astrology, and pranayama.

On a dinged-up Honda Activa scooter, I buzzed to my afternoon classes, tucking behind big city buses that snorted black plumes of diesel into the air. I dodged oncoming scooters that peeled away from me at the last minute and onto their intended route. From the near misses, I’ve come to understand the flow. Cruising under the shade of large peepal and tamarind trees, I’m inspired and exhilarated. My ego tells me that I’m learning something so different here that I must return home and show the people my acquired knowledge. My intentions were good, but I didn’t realize then how strong the terrible twos would draw me back into show-and-tell mode.

Oftentimes, I breathe a sigh of relief that social media didn’t exist 12 years ago during my formative years in yoga. It would have been too tempting to upload a video or photo of my asana with edifying captions. Instagram and Facebook would have made perfect outlets for distributing and leveraging the self-satisfaction that I experienced early on. I might’ve even gotten lost in how many “likes” that I acquired per post or focused on the next form of content to keep my followers’ attention.

Over time, however, I’ve come to no longer feel the need to school people back home about my new knowledge. Like me, others discover new things on their own timeline. I can only be true to my experiences and to the things that I have unearthed. Throughout this process, I’ve learned a great deal from my guru, Sharath Jois, about yoga and myself that could never have been espoused in one semester or a master’s program for that matter. I’ve made good friends in Mysore, who are also brave learners, exploring new and old territory. I’ve listened to their unique experiences and perspectives. Whether I’m at home or in Mysore, I can sense a calmness growing inside me every year. My reactions altered, my sleep better, my thinking gaining more clarity. Sometimes I think it’s the yoga, then I’m reminded there’s so much more.

The post My Life as an Ashtanga Student in Mysore: Growing Pains appeared first on Sonima.

A city in southern India, Mysore offers a charming retreat from the hustle and bustle of nearby major metropolises, like Bangalore to the northeast. At every turn, you’ll find a temple or a pipal tree with red and ocher powders dusted around its trunk, where spontaneous worship to Lord Vishnu or Shiva can be offered. The institute is located in the neighborhood of Gokulam, a place that after traveling through small villages and large industrial cities, I couldn’t help but nickname “Beverly Hills” from the lush greens trees, affluent two-story homes, and fancy front-yard gardens. Still, there was no doubt, I was far from home: Piglets freely roamed the ravines with their mamas and holy cows grazed the streets in a moveable feast of delights often fed from the hands of Indian housewives.

What brought me here? My intended teacher, Sri. K. Pattabhi Jois (known as Guruji) lived and taught in Mysore, where serious students of yoga make their pilgrimage. He was a student of T. Krishnamacharya and helped to advance yoga into today’s world. Guruji’s yoga is Ashtanga yoga. Mysore is the source. Mecca. This was where I was heading on “The Yoga Trail.” Along the way I’d met people practicing at different levels, in different stages of their lives, from different countries. The things they talked about became part of my personal yoga journey, too.

Related: Sharath Jois Shares His Personal Yoga Story

Some people groused that Mysore is expensive. “You’ll be gouged on rent,” they warned. Of course, I’d found other parts of India cheaper than Mysore, but when I arrived, I found a house with a converted puja (prayer) room to sleep in for $40. Not bad. It was the second myth about Mysore that had me nervous: Cash flow was unreliable in these parts. After I settled into my room, I forged for rupees. “The Yoga Trail” warned me one must have the exact fee. After several ATMs rejected me, I anxiously appeared at registration with no money. “No problem,” a woman who worked at the institute said, bobbling her head left and right. The institute ran on the honor system.

“The Yoga Trail” had failed to state that of Guruji’s classes could be full, which they were. Instead I signed up to practice with his grandson, Sharath. “The Yoga Trail” whispered “Beware. This energy is fake. You will fly in the shala, but it’ll never be duplicated elsewhere. The energy is like a drug high.”

“The Yoga Trail” was partly right. I was flying. Jump backs, jump-throughs, twists, lift up, up dog, down dog, inhale, exhale. Oxygen in, oxygen out. Endorphins coursed through me. My body moved like I was inhabited by an ethereal spirit. It was incredibly fun, and if I would never have this experience again, I didn’t care. I loved everything about it. I loved silently waiting in the cue watching the experienced practitioners with earlier start-times than me. I loved jumping to attention when Sharath commanded “one more.” No one in the room spoke except for him. We were a silent orchestra, and he was the maestro. We knew the notes to the music.

Inside the shala, I dripped with sweat. In a new-age-y meets kindergartener’s attempt to better connect to yoga and my newly found freedom, I wrote “Tierra” in black marker on my purple yoga mat, which in Spanish means land or earth. I was trying to find an identity or purpose to hold onto. My friends back home would later accuse me of having too much time on my hands, sitting around naming a yoga mat.

“Tierra,” Sharath said, waving me inside to practice. At first, I didn’t respond, but then I realized he was calling my yoga mat name. “The Yoga Trail” professed that you’re just a number in Mysore. No one will know who you are. But now Sharath knew my name. Well, my yoga mat’s name.

Intuitively, I must have known that I was heading in the right direction. A new me was somewhere inside. A different me from the one engaged in finance and law. I learned Atha Yoganushasanam on my first trip to Mysore. The first sutra of The Yoga Sutras written by the sage Patanjalim, and the basis for yoga philosophy. It translates to: “Now there is yoga.” This was how I felt. Now I was ready for change. Now I was ready to embrace a alternate approach to life. Now I was leaving behind an old formula and exploring a new one. Now I was like a newborn slapped on the bum and breathing in oxygen for the first time. A new name was apropos.

I looked at Sharath, grabbed Tierra, and walked into the shala.

While the word Tierra has faded from that mat, I still practice on it whenever I visit my family in Texas. I’ve returned to Mysore plenty of times since that first fateful visit, and I’ve humbly learned many lessons. I trust in the process. I no longer listen to the whispers of “The Yoga Trail.” I listen to my guru, Sharath, who reminds me of this: “In this life, we each have unique experiences and a unique life to realize. No two experiences are the same.”

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