Skip to main content

Happy new year 2020 and a message


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-āsevito dṛḍhabhūmiḥ) elaborates it is only when the correct practice is followed for a long time, without interruptions and with a quality of positive attitude and eagerness, that it can succeed.  Please note that daily practice of 20 to 30 minutes is better than practicing for longer duration only once a week.
Yoga Sadhana can mean different things to different folks.  Karma yogis use it to gain purity of thought and mind, Jnana yogis use it to remove ignorance by assimilating right knowledge through Shravana, Manana and Nidhi Dhyasana, Bhakti Yogis use it to express love and dissolve ego through surrender and Raja Yogis use it to elevate mind to highest levels of concentration and refinement by regular practice of  asanas, pranayama and meditation.  Here’s one good talk on Sadhana and these different streams of yoga: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSIjcfoUJgo&t=3218s  (talk starts at 17:25)
Taking example from our own Milpitas’s kids’ classes, please see this 3rd grader demonstrate a number of concepts that he developed over the last three years of continued Sadhana.  Definitely kudos to the parents and kids for continued commitment and dedication from a young age.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/wCsbDtv13BLRez7x6
Thank you for reading and happy practicing. Wish you all again a happy, healthy and peaceful new year.
Best regards, Shailesh and Milpitas Yoga Bharati Team
(Winter 2020 calendar at: https://yogabharati.org/milpitas-classes)


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Yoga and me

Yoga has been a way of life for me. My first guru was my father who introduced me to Yoga at an early age of around 7 or 8. I am who am I today mainly because of his guidance and his teachings. In the last couple of years, I have worked closely with a few Gurus in US. Dr. Sachin at ICC has been a great mentor. I was very impressed by his gentle and caring approach to Yoga. http://drsachindeshmukh.com/ I have noticed that in the last several months, stress levels have gone up amongst my friends, family and colleagues. Economic times have not helped the cause either. People are always on the run. Long work hours, hyper-active kids and their activities, long commutes, sedentary life styles and unemployment seem to be some of the common factors. I personally felt that I can share the knowledge of Yoga that I have been practicing for years to reduce their stress levels. Around this time, I came across this wonderful organization "Yoga Bharati". I instantly joined their Yoga teache...
2 comments
Read more

Happy New Year 2022 and a message

  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...
1 comment
Read more

Patanjali Yoga Sutras - Sadhana (1.13 tatra sthitau yatno-‘bhyāsaḥ and 1.14 sa tu dīrghakāla nairantarya satkāra-ādara-āsevito dṛḍhabhūmiḥ)

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. This is the time many of us make important resolutions. Some of us are good at keeping them, but many of us aren’t and the resolutions start to wear off after a few weeks. We would like to just give some suggestions to keep up your ‘yoga practice’ resolution. We have been blessed over the last several years to have listened to many gurus about leading happy, healthy and peaceful lives. Many gurus provide these messages in their own beautiful way, based on their lineage, personal experiences and other aspects. One of the important aspects all of them talk about is the importance of ‘ Sadhana ’ or ‘a strict discipline of a routine practice’. Patanjali’s Ashtanga Yoga discusses in depth about Sadhana required to go from outward interactions (Yamas) to deep state of absorption (Sa...
Post a Comment
Read more