Namaste everyone, Wish you all a very happy and healthy new year. We started this morning with beautiful Surya Namaskar sadhana where we offered our reverence and gratitude to the Sun God ( hiraṇmayena pātreṇa ), Sage Patanjali (Yōgēna cittasya), Swami Vivekananda (Each soul is potentially divine…), Guru RaghuramJi and other gurus. All these gurus have provided us with authoritative source of knowledge (āgamāḥ) over the years and centuries. Sage Patanjali talks about how the knowledge we acquire can affect our mind (vrittis). The knowledge we acquire through various means is classified by Patanjali into five types (PYS 1.6) a) Right knowledge b) Wrong knowledge c) Imaginary knowledge d) Remembered knowledge (memory) e) No knowledge (sleep). This knowledge can lead to pleasurable or painful experiences and the objective always is to reduce or eliminate any wrong knowledge (eg. fake news, non-authoritative sources). These pleasurable and painful exp...
Namaste everyone, Yoga Bharati Milpitas team wishes you all a very happy and healthy new year. We hope that you all are enjoying the winter break and spending some quality time with friends and family. As you look forward to the new year and your goals, please make stress management as one of your top goals. 75-90% of all doctor's office visits are for stress-related ailments and complaints. Studies show that stress can play an important role in developing ailments such as headaches, high blood pressure, heart problems, diabetes, skin conditions, asthma, arthritis, depression and anxiety. Patanjali’s yoga sutras give us many tools and techniques to deal with stress. One of the important aspects we can learn from yoga sutras is about sadhana. Yoga Sutra 1.13 (tatra sthitau yatno-‘bhyāsaḥ) defines Sadhana - practice is basically the correct effort required to move toward, reach, and maintain the state of Yoga and 1.14 ( sa tu dīrghakāla nairantarya satkāra-ādara-āsev...