As a student, I avoided my educational challenges by spending my spare time smoking profusely and drinking. Instead of helping, this made things worse for me. My hardships just piled up.
Fortunately, I always had an insatiable curiosity about the mysteries of life and the origins of creation. So I would take out books from the library to find answers to my inner turmoil. One day I came across a big-sized yellow book about Yoga with a sacred seal written on the cover.
I looked at the index and briefly looked at the contents and decided to take the book home to read.
That book changed my life. It told me about another way of living. It introduced me to yoga.
Yoga is not ONLY meant to alleviate us from stress, depression, anxiety and so on but it cultivates our spiritual consciousness allowing us to behave above the norm of everyday varsity challenges.
First I came to understand that I am the Self within and not this material body. I am not my body. I am the driver of my body. I have to grow my Self or spirit so that I can be bigger than my material limitations.
Yoga has given me an authorized and regulative practice that trains me and enables me to cultivate knowledge and awareness of Self.
In the great ancient Yoga Text known as the Bhagavad-Gita, there is a very interesting definition of Yoga meaning controlling the senses’ or ‘yama-niyama’.
Originally the term yoga in its etymological origin means ‘to join or to link up with the Self’. So from both the philosophical meaning and etymological meaning of the word yoga we can already see how yoga in itself as a practice serves as a system of discipline meant to control one’s restless material senses, to link one back to their natural, calm and serene and spiritual state, regulating one’s mode of living and ultimately detaching one’s mind from futile material engagements.
As a student I now have a platform that helps me free myself from the constantly stressful challenges and daunting experiences always prevalent in tertiary life. It is helping me achieve my academic goals. And this is where the pure practice of yoga can be of great assistance to the struggling student.
Yoga provides ongoing relief to pressures we all face as students.
I see students often resort to momentary or temporary means of relieving pressures that are harmful to them. These include activities such as drinking, chronic smoking, over- eating, gambling and over-indulgence in unrestricted (and sometimes unprotected) sexual relations.
Such activities all have negative and deteriorating reactions to our mental and physical health and academic performance.
For more information about how to learn these yoga techniques please visit our website:
www.bhaktiyoga.wordpress.com
Or call us at:
(051) 447 7029,
Our Yoga Centre location is:
1 Bompart St. cnr Brill St, Westdene
This should be compulsory- at least one credit for all students
I am so happy to read this great article! Yoga is an excellent practice to achieve balance and inner calm. This practice will help you throughout your life.
For those who prefer something more “contemplative, ” meditation is another powerful practice. When one learns to go within and become still one is able to feel balanced and in a state of inner harmony, even when life throws its usual curve balls.