KOCHI: If It wasn’t for an injury which cut-short his volleyball career, Jose Joseph would have been a known name in the Indian sports circuit. But as the adage goes, ‘everything happens for the best’, he has taken the experience in his stride and pursued a career in yoga and psychology to help sports people succeed in their respective field.
Joseph, who spent around 4 decades of his life in Italy, played a key role in the meteoric rise of Italian national volleyball league side Copra Volley to the top division. During his three-year-long stint (1999-2002) with the club, this volleyball aficionado had helped the players to stay focused in the game. It was Jose, who taught them to have a clear mind before, during and after the games by engaging them in yoga.
Joseph recalls many memorable moments from the days he spent in association with the game in Italy. Meeting the Indian volleyball legend Jimmy George is one such moment he remembers with pride. He also had close working relationships with Mauro Berruto, the current Italian national volleyball team coach.
“Jimmy George was a very friendly person and used to meditate before every match which helped him to be the player he was on the court. Meanwhile, Berruto is a motivator and psychologist first and a coach second,” recalls Joseph.
An ardent football lover too, Joseph has his allegiance with Juventus FC of Turin. “When you watch the footballers stepping up to take the penalties at the ongoing World Cup, you can see that most of them are a bundle of nerves. This is where practising a meditating tool like yoga comes in,” he says. “What you need is a clear and focused mind and a complete disregard for things that do not matter,” Joseph says.
With Joseph serving as the yoga instructor, Copra Volley got promoted from the second tier to the top division in 2002, also winning the Italian Cup. He says that yoga can do wonders to you, especially in sports, where margins are very fine. According to him what happened in 2002 was as close to a wonder as it would get.
Having attended several Serie A football matches at the Juventus Stadium, Joseph was hugely disappointed after Italy bowed out of the current World Cup in the group stages. “In European countries, sports, especially football, is a very serious business. Many of my friends in Italy have stopped watching football after the debacle, at least for a few weeks,” he says.
Along with his involvement in volleyball, Joseph also introduced various cultural artforms of India to the Italians. He also developed a branch of psychology combining the European and Indian ways of thinking, which he named practical psychology.
“In Italy as well as other European countries, methods like yoga are welcomed and practised with dedication. Unfortunately, when the West take all the positive aspects from our culture, we on the other hand, mostly end up imbibing the negatives from the West,” he says.
Joseph, born and brought up in Erumeli, Kottayam, had his first taste of yoga from Sri Aurabindo Ashram, Pondicherry, where he spent three years learning the techniques of the same. He moved to Italy in 1972 enrolling in medical course at University of Turin and later learnt psychology at the Naples University.
After spending his heydays in Italy, this Yoga trainer recently moved back to India with plans to instruct yoga in city schools. Setting up a yoga training centre in Thiruvananthapuram and holding yoga classes for children are foremost in his list of goals.