I remembered in an interview PM Narendra Modi was asked, ‘how many hours he sleeps?, to which Modiji replied “Doctors told me I need to sleep for 5 hours but I sleep for maximum 3-4 hours yet, I get a very sound sleep. I am equally energetic from morning till night. I guess the secret behind it is Yoga and Pranayama, which I do daily, whenever I feel tired, I just practice deep breathing and that refreshes me again”.
Hats off to his energy, no one can deny his energy levels. He works 20 hours a day but never looked tired or over worked. India is blessed with yogic science and exercise, Yoga has power to cure many illness and key to the wellness. There are many legends who contributed to shredding Yoga across the globe. However, Modi is the first Prime Minister who made an effort to bring up on the world stage. Modi called for observing an International Yoga Day, describing the ancient science as “India’s gift to the world.” Prior to the 2014 UN resolution declaring June 21 as International Day of Yoga, formal and informal groups of yoga teachers and enthusiasts celebrated World Yoga Day on dates other than 21 June in support of various causes. Practicing Yoga is not a religious rituals, it is a way of living with an aim towards ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’.
Human is a physical, mental and spiritual being; yoga helps promote a balanced development of all the three. Other forms of physical exercises like aerobics or gymnasium assure only physical well-being. They have little to do with the development of the spiritual or astral body. Yogic exercises recharge the body with cosmic energy. The art of practicing yoga helps in controlling an individual mind, body and soul. It brings together physical and mental disciplines to achieve a peaceful body and mind, it helps to manage stress and anxiety and keep you relaxing. It also helps in increasing flexibility, muscle strength and body tone. It improves respiration, energy and vitality. Practicing yoga might seem like just stretching, but it can do much more for your body from the way you feel, look and move.
Nowadays, people are addicted to artificial methods of treating their body. Beauty salons are mushrooming in cities and becoming priorities. However, wrong food habits, lack of sleep, addictions is resulting in pre mature aging and health disorders. Here, cosmetic centers and its doctors are making profit by showing you dreams of transformation and make you fit and fine. Actresses like Rekha, Bipasha Basu, Shilpa Shetty, Lara Dutta etc have proven how yoga helped them. The true essence of Yoga revolves around elevating the life force or ‘Kundalini’ at the base of the spine. It aims to achieve this through a series of physical and mental exercises. At the physical level, the methods comprise various yoga postures or ‘asanas’ that aim to keep the body healthy. The mental techniques include breathing exercises or ‘pranayama’ and meditation or ‘dhyana’ to discipline the mind. The ultimate goal of yoga is, however, to help the individual to transcend the self and attain enlightenment. As the Bhagavad-Gita says, “A person is said to have achieved yoga, the union with the Self, when the perfectly disciplined mind gets freedom from all desires, and becomes absorbed in the Self alone.”
One of yoga’s primary benefits for adults is the mitigation of stress. Students may be young, but they are immune to stress. Family pressure, financial fears, academic performance standards and peer groups can all take a toll on a student’s psyche and success in school. A study published in the “International Journal of Yoga” in 2009 examined the effect of yoga on academic performance on highly stressed adolescent students.
The researchers — from MGN College of Education in Jalandhar, India — found that seven weeks of regularly doing poses, practicing yoga breathing and participating in mediation practice reduced students’ stress levels, which translated into better academic performance. A later study performed by Harvard Medical School researchers and published in the January 2012 issue of the “Journal of Behavioral Health Services and Research” also found that high-school students who participated in yoga instead of traditional physical education offerings for a semester exhibited improvements in mood, anxiety, perceived stress and resilience.
I am sure, people like me would be really thankful to our PM for emphasizing on Yoga and wellness of people across the globe. However, when we are talking about Yoga, we cannot ignore a person who made it reach to the common people; Baba Ramdev. He is the one who popularized yoga among Indians through his mass yoga camps and televangelism. He went places to places to convince people about the importance of Yoga and Ayurveda. His contribution is amazingly remarkable.
I hope, you will not only participate in International Yoga Day on 21st June, but also involve it in your lifestyle to live a healthy life.
