Samasthiti

I found myself in Singapore the month of October and out of the blue, I decided to message a teacher of mine. I had met him at his studio in Serangoon - Yoga Kalari in January 2016, I attended two sessions and then signed up for a package but soon happened to injure my shoulder and couldn't practice for a few months. After that healed, i moved houses and where I worked also moved and somehow the commute all the way to Serangoon was just too hectic. Work got crazy busy as well and I eventually moved out of Singapore.  Over time with age, I have come to realise that things that are meant to be will be and things that aren't can never be forced to manifest. This isn't a novel thought of course. But the intensity with which i am confronted by it time and again makes me realise the powerful truth of it. At the time when I discovered Master Suresh, I had been searching for a teacher who could elevate my practice - my asana practice, more than my yoga practice. An...

For those who know me, a part of my personality is inextricably linked to Bollywood or the Hindi film industry. I have often found in some of the richer stories the industry has told, a sense of solace and peace - and more often than not, I have also found a guiding light in dialogues, situations, place, characters and mostly songs and lyrics. While it is dangerous to base your life decisions to a dialogue you hear someone on screen narrate, i believe that inspiration and guidance comes from everywhere and everyone -  you only have to be open to it. A quote that is attributed to rumi says - your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.   I believe that quote can be applied to many things in life - in your search for creativity, in your journey to find the divine, in your spiritual quest for the unknowable & unreachable, in your progress towards your career or craft - everything. We merel...

I opened this blog of mine on a whim today. I've been immensely active on my other blog - just writing about life gone by and life coming up, about growing up and learning lessons. I've often thought about writing on this one - but I was frankly having a lot of fun there and I am in a very specific mood and state of mind when I write on Samasthiti and for some reason I wasn't reaching that state and hence this blog remained untouched.  Until today. Today, I opened the blog and realised I had last written here in Jan 2018. That's 8 months back. The year has only four more months to go and I have only written about yoga once. How is that possible i ask myself. Especially in what has most probably been the most rocky phase or rather uncertain phase of my life! My practice is lovely, and that has kept me sane, in fact the one time I stopped it because I got too busy with life and work - I fell terribly sick. Lesson learned I guess. This post is something I'm r...

When people realise I am yogi, the question i get is "what kind of yoga do you do?". I often want to start that answer with a smile and a long explanation- but I then think it might come across as too pretentious and arrogant and end up answering with a plain " I do all kinds - hatha, vinaysa, but the core of all  asana practice of all yoga is hatha yoga". And that's true - any kind of physical asana practice (ashtanga, bikram, power, vinyasa) is all Hatha - which is a perfect balance of the Sun (Ha) and the Moon (Tha) - the hot and cold energies, the male and female present within each of us, the need to be willful and also let go - prevalent not just in human beings, but anything you see around you in nature. Every ying has it's yang, every night circles back to a day. I see this confluence a natural way of being - for no-one and nothing can stay static in it's own form forever. This impermanence scares people - it has scared me many a time in the...