Thousands of people played table tennis, shuttle badminton, football, volleyball, basketball, cricket – bowling, batting and fielding, swimming and rowing on one day. On another day the same numbers of people got down to doing all the work that a village woman would have done 30 years ago – sweeping, mopping, drawing water from the well, carrying pots, pounding rice, grinding the grains and chutney, churning buttermilk, milking the cows, washing clothes….
Well it was all imaginary action under the guidance of Swami Sadyojathah and Girin Govind from the Art of Living Foundation at the Indoor Basket Ball Stadium in Kilpauk. The occasion was a three-day Pranayam Dhyan Shibir, which the Swamiji called a “health and happiness camp.” Teaching Sukshma Yoga or the subtle way of energising every cell of the body from head to toe, he later told Expresso that according to Sri Sri Ravishankar, health was not just about absence of disease.
Good health is having a disease free body, quiver-free breath, stressfree mind, inhibition-free intellect, trauma-free memory, an ego that includes all people and a sorrowfree self.” The exercises incorporated all these seven factors in them – men and women of all ages walked like gorillas, quacking like ducks and clucking like a horse, making monkey faces. They also learnt how to rotate their arms, wrists, legs and feet with the awareness of the breath throughout the exercises as the odd movements of the body were breaking many of their inhibitions down. “Swasthya is the Sanskrit word for good health,” said the Swamiji. It means reposing in the self. People are always at the task of postponing their happiness – school, college, job, marriage, children, and even up to the age when they become grandparents – they are not able to relax and be happy. Quoting Sri Sri Ravishankar, he said that happiness is lost just like sleep for the person who is busy making his bed all night. Sukshma Yoga teaches people to learn a little bit of each dimension of happiness, which is in the “Now” and never in the distant future.
The breath contains a lot of secrets and Sukshma Yoga helps those who have already been into some form of fitness to complement their exercises by channelling the life force called Prana Shakti through the energy channels or Nadis in the body.
All exercises and fitness should ultimately lead to meditation, he said pointing out that there was a misconception in the minds of people that meditation meant concentration.
“You concentrate only when you have to focus on some work. You don’t concentrate to enjoy a holiday, but just relax,” he said. He holds that meditation is the opposite of concentration and in fact, concentration was just the result of medicine.
The three-day event, which happened in two sessions in the morning and evening, had thousands of participants from all over Chennai getting a thorough orientation on what fitness was all about.
