Yoga-Darshini : How it all began (1)

If someone told me 5 years back that I will be a yoga entrepreneur, I would have laughed my head off. I had never tried yoga in my life and neither did I have any inclination to pursue it because I thought it was too easy, to slow and hence too boring.

I had always found a lot of joy in being active. I was running half marathons and doing triathlons while passionately hating my full time job. My running, swimming and cycling activities along with dedicated strength training kept me sane and gave me a sense of accomplishment, which I failed to find in my professional life, even though by all standards, I was a good “resource”.

All through my banking career, I had a feeling of being incomplete and carried a vague sense of unhappiness – like a mild stomach upset that you know it is there but is not really stopping you from eating what you want, yet not really feeling hungry nor able to truly relish what you are eating. This feeling grew and grew I hit the lowest of the lows…feeling utterly lost, miserable, hating my self and my life and not knowing what to do, but desperate to do something yet not having courage or will to do anything. The misery finally pushed me to find answers to the questions that were nagging me…who am I? why am I here? what is the point of all this? why we do what we do when we all are anyways going to die?

This is when I stumbled upon Chinmaya Mission and my my first vedantic Acharya. Initially, I couldn’t make head or tail about the teachings. But her love and patience helped my to really start reflecting what was being taught and chew on those ideas until I was able to at least intellectually comprehend what was being said. Purely dealing with the subject of Self, vedantic studies turned my attention to my inner world and slowly started transforming me from inside out.

After almost two years of sincere studies and trying my best to apply it in my everyday life, I got the courage to leave my banking job to explore what else life holds for me. It was at that time my Acharya nudged me to do my yoga teacher training course…yes the same me who has never ever done yoga before. So with zero idea about yoga, with zero flexibility (thanks to all the running) and with zero exposure to the yoga community, I packed my bags and set off to a month long residential yoga teacher training course!

What happened next? To be continued….