My journey from Gym Yoga to Spiritual Yoga
A little contribution to International Day of Yoga 21st June
Yoga & I first met, 14 years ago. It felt necessary as I was a gym addict and paying for a weekly massage was killing my budget. So one day, after an uplifting and sweaty spinning class with high beat music— I decided to walk into a yoga class. An hour later, yoga had done the trick. I felt stretched like never before and ready to hit the gym again the next day. This became my new routine
Yoga was now my stretching class
Fast forward a few years, still, a gym addict now squash and running added to the mix. Yoga was now a necessity. But then I hit a rough patch at work, I needed to keep calm and focussed to get my work performance up. For the next month, I committed to a daily 7AM yoga class at my gym in Central London.
Yoga saved me, I was exceeding expectations at work
Fast forward to last summer, 2019. I had spent the previous years focusing on meditation, I felt calm and well. Now, I felt I wanted to change my energy from calm to high. After some research, I decided Hatha Yoga and specifically Surya Kriya was what I wanted. After 6 hours of a private session within 1 day with a qualified Hatha Yoga teacher, I was ready to do it on my own.
Surya Kriya, what is it? Just to elaborate, Surya Kriya is a practice that allows you to align your energy with the energy of the sun. It is practised at sunrise and sunset. You start with some preparation asanas. After that, Surya Kriya can be done in 1, 3, 7, 9, 11, 12 cycles. One cycle consists of 21 asanas or poses. Each asana has a specific breath count and with a focussed awareness you can follow the sequence of 3, 5, 7 breaths throughout the practice. Surya Kriya must be practised on an empty stomach condition which means a 4 hours gap after a full meal.
I practised Surya Kriya twice daily for 2 weeks before it got interrupted by unexpected travels across Europe, Taiwan and Nepal.
40-day sadhana. Another fast forward to early January this year, I was back in London and decided to re-start my Hatha Yoga practice. I committed myself to a 40-day sadhana to allow the practice to become part of my system. I didn’t make it easy on myself, in addition to yoga at sunrise and sunset, I also started practising Intermittent fasting.
80-day sadhana and more. On the 40th day of my Sadhana, I decided to do it all over again. On the 80th day of my Sadhana, there was no turning back — it’s now been 6 months that I’ve been practising Hatha Yoga twice a day. It doesn’t make me an expert whatsoever, but I have been learning how my breath, mind and body need to be aligned. It's an ongoing journey, where I’m continuing to learn.
Happy International Day of Yoga to everyone! Thanks for reading.
About the Author
Many thanks to Dr Mehmet Yildiz for interviewing me as a new creative writer of ILLUMINATION
Further reading
As a new writer, I’ve been keen to explore various topics and writing styles. Have a look at some of the other articles I’ve published recently and please feel free to share your thoughts! It’s always great to learn from feedback
