Yoga and Spirituality

Spirituality gives inner strength to manage difficult situations and to keep smiling. Being established in the Self, your inner peace spreads outward, and makes you a more responsible human-being full of caring, sharing and love. Spirituality is not just mumbo-jumbo, sitting somewhere and doing something. It is revisiting the truth about ourselves.

According to Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, “The word yoga means skill- skill to live your life, to manage your mind, to deal with your emotions, to be with people, to be in love and not let that love turn into hatred.”

If you ask different people what spirituality is about and what it means to them, you will get several different answers which means that spirituality is a highly individualized process and experience. Nobody owns it- neither Buddhists, nor Christians, nor Hindus, nor Muslims, nor Jews nor atheists. Spirituality is an interior journey, one that takes you within, thoughtful about your actions.

I would encourage you all to look inside and discover your own inner journey with your Self. It’s best to become your own spiritual scientist. Your spiritual path should in no way be directed only towards yourself, it should definitely serve others. Exploration, truly, leads to practice- like spending more time in meditation, prayer or contemplation, and a little less time on social media, or bringing more mindfulness to the activities you’re passionate about. That’s how we expand our perspectives. In doing so, we’re also cultivating our inner knowing, wisdom, and intuition in a way that’s directly experienced rather than hypothesized.

It’s not like spirituality is going to magically fix everything. In some cases it can make things seem worse and more chaotic before they get better. If we’re being totally real about our practice, spirituality will inevitably, at some point, shake and crumble the carefully crafted foundations of what we believe about ourselves, others and life, in general. This is because spirituality dismantles all the conditioning we have been subject to since birth, be it from our family, friends, teachers, or society as a whole. Raw spirituality, rather than adding more beliefs and ideas about who we are and what we think we are, peels them away, bringing us deeper within ourselves to the place where the real truth resides.

Things such as learning to accept what we have and own, learning to live mindfully with the acceptance of whatever life hands us, seeing (and honoring) the beauty, wonder and inter connectedness of all things, and cultivating a greater sense of loving kindness for ourselves as well as others definitely won’t always be  the blessed-out love-and-light endeavor that many think spirituality is supposed to be.

Tibetan Buddhist teacher Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche writes, “Spiritual awakening is not a happy-go-lucky endeavor. The path of truth is profound- and so are the obstacles and possibilities for self-deception.”

After we spend some time working with spiritual practices and learning from those who’ve walked the path before us, it’s inevitable that we will begin to awaken in new ways. So if you’re up for a wondrous, strange, beautiful, eye-popping, and mind-melting experience, one that is simultaneously nothing special at all, then you have to be ready to keep an open mind.

Yoga teachings emphasize clear vision and action, which points to my favorite definition of spirituality: clarity, connection, trust and flow. In yoga practice, we see thoughts as energy, capacities, and even as movement within the body just like the structural forms achieved in asana. We remind ourselves that we may choose and manage our thoughts, and thereby direct our energy where we want it to go. We practice being more grounded, both in our postures and our intentions. Oftentimes, our practice does lead to more clarity in our relationships with family, friends, lovers, or work colleagues and in our actions in the world.

Being spiritual means being clear, connected, trusting and aware of everything I’m doing- especially when I’m engaging in behaviours that stop the flow of acceptance and ease in my daily life. With a few action steps and a steady diet of Hatha yoga on the side, there’s no amount of fatigue or sadness that can talk us out of being great. By owning our behavior, cleaning up past messes, and making promises and setting consequences are no longer invisible around us- they are the very centre of our conversation.

Yoga and spirituality are entwined and one helps the other in achieving greater success in one’s life- is emotionally healing and spiritually uplifting.

विशेष संपादकीय -

कोई भी बीमारी सबसे पहले व्यक्ति की प्रतिरोधक क्षमता को प्रभावित करती है और भारत में युगों से योग, प्राणायाम और आयुर्वेद के माध्यम से इसी रोग प्रतिरक्षण प्रणाली को मजबूत बनाने के सिद्धांतों का अनुपालन किया जाता रहा है. कोविड-19, जिसकी चपेट में आज सारा विश्व है, उससे लड़ने का एक बेहतर तरीका आपका मजबूत श्वसन तंत्र और बेहतर इम्यून सिस्टम हो सकता है. आयुष मंत्रालय भी योग, प्राणायाम और आयुर्वेदिक सुझावों के जरिये सभी को स्वस्थ रहने की सलाह दे रहा है, जिसका पालन स्वयं पीएम मोदी भी कर रहे हैं, तो आप भी अपनी दिनचर्या में प्राणायाम को शामिल करते हुए अपनी इम्युनिटी को बूस्ट कर सकते हैं...

1. श्वसन तंत्र के स्वास्थ्य में अहम भूमिका होती है फेफड़ों की, अमूमन हम गहरी श्वास नहीं लेते हैं, जिसके चलते फेफड़ों का मात्र एक चौथाई हिस्सा ही क्रियाशील रहता है और बाकी तीन चौथाई हिस्सा स्थिर रहता है. हमारे फेफड़े लगभग 75 मिलियन कोशिकाओं से बने होते हैं और सामान्य श्वास से केवल फेफड़ों के 20 मिलियन छिद्रों तक ही ऑक्सीजन पहुंच पाती है, जिसके कारण हम धीरे धीरे  श्वसन संबंधी रोगों से ग्रसित हो जाते हैं. 

2. प्राणायाम और योग क्रियाओं से हम गहन श्वसन क्रिया करते हैं, जिससे ऑक्सीजन फेफड़ों में समरूपता से पहुंचती हैं, रक्त शुद्धि होती है और प्रतिरोधक क्षमता मजबूत होती है. नतीजतन हम रोगों से बचे रहते हैं और यदि किसी रोग के शिकार बन जाते हैं तो उससे लड़ने में हमारी प्रतिरोधक क्षमता हमारी सहायता करती है.

3. कपालभाति से फेफड़ों में हुयी किसी भी प्रकार की ब्लॉकेज खुलती है, नर्वस सिस्टम व पाचन क्रिया भी मजबूत होते हैं. साथ ही यह तन-मन को ऊर्जावान बनाती है. 

4. अनुलोम विलोम से हमारे श्वसन तंत्र और रक्त प्रवाह को बल मिलता है, किसी भी प्रकार का तनाव, स्ट्रेस या डिप्रेशन इसके रोजाना अभ्यास से कम होता है क्योंकि यह हमारे दायें और बायें मस्तिष्क को समान रूप से सक्रियता देता है. 

5. मानसिक तनाव, अनिद्रा, डिप्रेशन, सर्दी, साइनोसाइटिस जैसी समस्याओं के लिए भ्रामरी प्राणायाम सबसे अधिक उपयोगी है. इसके अभ्यास से हमारा मानसिक स्वास्थ्य बेहतर होता है. 

Attached Images