Always Be In Tune With Your Body

In my years of practice as a Doctor of Alternative Medicine that spans nearly two decades, I have truly come to believe in the power of the mind-body-spirit connect. Our minds determine how healthy our bodies are and conversely, how we treat our bodies impacts our mental state. And yoga has been integral to maintaining a healthy connection among the three; not just in my personal life but also in the lives of my clients.

My journey of yoga began when I was in fourth grade when we had to practice yoga and display it before our parents. I vividly remember being amused by how yoga tests the limits of our physical body. Given that we were only 9 years old and too young to fathom the discipline thoroughly, there wasn’t any emphasis on the mind or the breath. As I grew up, sports became one of my major identities. Soon yoga took a backseat. But what stayed with me were the “stretches” as well as the learning that I need to always be in tune with my body.  

After some years, I moved to Canada to finish my education, around the same time that yoga had just taken birth there. It had attained a connotation of spirituality and its reach spread far and wide fast across Toronto. If you were a yoga practitioner, you were viewed as more evolved. As I began to practice yoga regularly, I also began to forge friendships with other practitioners. Some of whom would come home to practice. While this didn’t happen all too often, it was something that actually connected us. Yoga had an uncanny knack of popping up in my practice as a healer since I used a lot of breath work in relaxing the mind and understanding in depth the somatic of the body. 

The discipline served me well when I moved from Canada to India, for there was one thing I knew I could continue and that was yoga. Upon my return, I started going to Kaivalyadhama, a yoga institute. While the guidance I received was essential, I felt I wanted a personal guru. I didn’t want the practice to just involve following a booklet or have somebody walking around, I needed it to be deeper. Eventually, I found B K S Iyengar Yoga and I fell in love with yoga once again. Their methodology was very precise, requiring me to work on every inch of my body and understand what was needed. 

I completely turned to yoga when I was pregnant with my first child as I couldn’t practice any other sport except swimming. I’d do headstands and twists in order to relieve pain and prepare my body for a natural delivery. During the time that I was carrying my baby, I learned to be extremely sensitive to everything that was happening around and inside me. I believe this intense understanding came from yoga. The fact that I trusted the signals my body was giving me and I understood well ahead of time that my baby was on its way out prematurely. I knew the amniotic sac had started to leak. I had to get to the hospital. 

Apart from my own journey, yoga has equipped me to support others as well. Looking at the kind of pain my client's house in their body, I can easily decipher what the emotional source of the pain really is. It becomes simpler to navigate that pain and help other moves beyond it, in the physical practice as well as the emotional and mental practice of it. I employ yoga in my breathing techniques within my therapies because I understand the intricacies of how it impacts the mind and body. Nada yoga, the yoga of sound, is another useful discipline. Through the vibrations of the body, I understand where the chakras are logged and work towards opening it using breath and sound healing.

I know I will someday resume my yoga practice. Meanwhile, whenever I perform my “stretches”, I do it in the way of B K S Iyengar Yoga, exploring what and where I am stretching and how I am doing it. While I may have left the regular practice, yoga has never left me. It is has been a loyal friend, staying with me almost my entire life and awaiting me to come back to it. I am very thankful for the intense understanding I have developed, about myself and my surroundings, as a result of yoga. 

Happy International Day of Yoga!