My Introduction to Yoga
I started practicing yoga in 2005. Growing up in India, I had dabbled in yoga since my teenage years but didn’t fully appreciate the complete essence of it until later.
I was in Malaysia with my family on a dependent visa status for my husband’s expatriate assignment. Being an Occupational Therapist for 15+ years, I had been used to working in the US. For a few months I enjoyed the life of an expatriate wife but then started to get restless to work outside the house and learn something new.
This was when yoga came into my life again. I did not know many people in the new city but one good friend was enough to introduce me to a local friend of hers. Boom! That was it. This lady, who now is a very dear friend, had contacts beyond imagination and found a great yoga teacher for us.
Our teacher was a very gentle man with an extremely calm and quiet way around him. He would encourage us with his words and would guide us into an asana if he saw we were having a hard time with it. He would always say, ”If you have the right breathing, you will get into the pose easily”.
Breathing and meditation was a regular part of our yoga practice.
Meditation always made me turn inward and gave me time to look "inside" of myself. The need to continue to study yoga kept on growing and on one of my trips to Mumbai, India, I purchased Sadashiv Nimbalkar’s Yoga for Health and Peace and was introduced to the eight limbs of yoga.
Yoga in Sanskrit means to unite or yoke. It was then that I realized that yoga is a WAY OF LIFE! One does not “do” yoga but one can actually "live" it!
It was time for us to repatriate back to the US and once we got back, I registered myself in a yoga school and fortified myself by being certified to teach something that has been around for thousands of years!
Now, I am on my journey of humbly imparting an age old knowledge that is so close to us we are unable to see it.
To me it’s a connection of the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual being! It’s the connection of the energy that is in all of us. I call it Universal Connection to Health and it is an ongoing journey of being in union with yourself and the power you have in you.