Ludhiana’s new mantra for wellness: Yoga
Yoga is offering benefits that go well beyond the mat and this ancient practice has become increasingly popular in today’s fast-paced society. For many people, yoga provides a retreat from their chaotic lives, while others find both mental and physical advantages in it.
Be it summer or winter, city residents can be seen practising yoga in parks, gyms and specially curated yoga institutes.
Free yoga classes are being held in public parks across various colonies. Young and elderly individuals alike can be seen making their way to these green spaces with their mats in hand, either in the morning or evening. “It has been three years since I started doing yoga at a park near my house. My life has changed a lot since then and now I feel more relaxed and energetic throughout the day,” said Santosh Aggarwal, a resident of Aggar Nagar.
Sarabha Nagar resident Neha Grewal, who has been practising yoga for the past 15 years, said yoga was an art of living. She added that there were no benefits of doing yoga after eating junk food and sleeping late at night. “Yoga means a disciplined life and one can draw benefits from yoga only after leading a strictly disciplined life,” she said.
Advocating yoga practice in schools, yoga teacher Rohit Kumar added, “Yoga is an elixir that works on almost every new-age predicament such as obesity, hypertension, depression, diabetes and panic attacks. It is not a solution only for grown-ups but also for young children and can help them lead a better lifestyle as they grow up. It should be made mandatory in schools so that they take this up early in life and adopt it in their lifestyle.”
“There are breathing exercises such as anuloma-viloma, in which one learns to balance their breathing pattern and which has proved to help people with respiratory disorders. There are various asanas that are helpful in bringing flexibility to the body, such as Padmasana, a position known to be attained by gurus. Yoga originated in India and has been practised by rishis and munis for a long time. Spiritually, yoga practitioners have been seen to reach the seven levels of peace of mind and body, including Moksha and Samadhi,” he added.
Thirty-two-year-old Sheetal swears by yoga and cannot imagine starting her day without pranayama, though her beginning was not easy. “When I started working full-time in a corporate house, I noticed a lot of changes in my body and in my life.
I didn’t have a lot of energy, I couldn’t make time to work out and I was just feeling really down about myself. Making a few changes in my lifestyle like restraining from eating out and adopting yoga—and I loved it so much that I started doing it every day—I began to feel a lot better about myself,” she shared.
Punjab