Get to yog’s true form

Jasmine Singh

June 21, this is a date that no government official, no bureaucrat, no school teacher, no school going kid, and people in all other professions under the sun can ignore. This is a date when our country will leave everything behind and take in fresh breath, exhaling the stress, well, it’s the International Yoga Day. But there is one man, Yogi Swami Lal Ji, a yoga guru, practising it from the age of seven, who is not very happy with the entire yoga scene in the country. Dressed in white, straight cut kurta pyjama, white shoes, and a thick tuft of medium length jet black hair, falling equally on both the sides, Swami Lal ji doesn’t approve of the commercial twist given to yoga by some babas (the writing is clear on the wall, Baba Ramdev is the ‘baba’ here), and also how yoga can be painful.

I am not a business baba

I am a therapist; I am using simple yoga to cure people of modern day diseases that cannot be cured with medicine. I am against passing on of yoga, indiscriminately to people.

Yoga is harming people

Yoga is a way of life, the sad part is that there aren’t enough yoga teachers who are qualified to teach yoga, and on top of that the ones who teach do not know the fundamentals of yoga. In order to teach yoga, one has to have an in depth knowledge of the subject. If the teachers are not trained, how will they teach yoga, and if they don’t teach the right techniques, people will end up learning the wrong way. The end result is that they might hurt themselves while doing some asanas wrong, this is why I say yoga can be painful too. The entire purpose of yoga is to slowdown, so it cannot be performed in a rush.

Blame it on the TV channels

I feel that television channels have done a disservice. Television channels show beautiful girls doing yoga with soft music flowing, against a beautiful backdrop, this creates an illusion about yoga. And when people follow the same, they feel disappointed because they do not get the same results as the beautiful girls. I have been doing yoga on television since 1975 and I am still on air because I don’t show fluff.

Anything violent is not yoga

Take for instance kapalbhati that is taught by some babas, have you seen how vigorously they suck in air, pushing their stomach inwards with force, this can have a negative effect. I am not against any individual teaching this, all I want is to make people aware that kapalbhati can be done in a relaxed manner without any vigorous movements. The idea of this yoga technique is to purify the system and not to put additional stress on it.

Yoga is sold in commercial markets

As I said before, I am not business guru, and neither do I believe in accumulating wealth. (read the name on the wall). I am not here to create an empire on yoga unlike others. Just look at the yoga mats that you get these days, they hurt more than they give rest. Why don’t people use that normal foam and make it into a mat, it is much more comfortable.

jasmine@tribunemail.com