The Art Of Living Experience

Intro

On Thursday, the 5th of July, 2015, we took a trip to a center, the home of The Art Of Living in Bangalore. That day, we began a spiritual journey that may wind up having a profound impact on our lives.

The Beginning

We walked into a room that resembled a classroom. On one side of the wall was a series of windows, our only connection with the outside world. The walls were also bare, and minimalistic. Across the floor were a myriad of durries, which made the room slightly more welcoming than it was. Towards the front were two chairs flanking a desk with a portrait of Sri Sri Ravishankar, the man behind the programme. We saw a few other people but didn't do much besides making eye contact. 

Bhastrika Pranayam

After a few minutes, Anushka and I struck up a conversation with a girl named Samhita. She's 14, and in 10th grade. We talked about our lives, where we lived, and Dan Brown's Inferno. At 6:30 PM, two people walked in: a man and a woman. They sat down in the chairs at the front and introduced themselves as Amar Gupta and Swati Reddy, and were going to be our teachers for the duration of the course. Amar's a software engineer who's spent his career at Infosys, HP, and as of next week, Deloitte. Swati's unemployed and married. On the side was another woman named Poonam Jain. She's a education journalist with the Times of India and an assistant teacher. They welcomed us to the course and asked us what we wanted to get out of it. The general consensus was "I want to improve myself." Personally, I didn't settle for a reason as lame as that. I didn't exactly know what I wanted from the course, and realized that I would find value in it as time went on. They then told us about some of the rules that were going to be in place: only vegetarian food for the duration of the four days, one must always sit with their backs straight, and one mustn't sit next to someone they know. Fair enough. 

The Five Golden Rules

YES, the name of the course, stands for Youth Empowerment Seminar. In the course, we were told that we were going to empowered four aspects of life: social, emotional, physical, and mental. Three out of four of those were summed up using 5 rules.

Give 100%

Lets play a game. Scroll down only after you've done the instructions. 

1. Put a bottle down on the ground. 

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2. Now try to pick it up. 

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3. No! You failed! Go back to Step 2. 

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4. You did it again! Don't wind up actually picking it up, because that means you picked it up. But try to pick it up. 

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5. Give up? Clueless? Read on. 

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If you really tried to pick up the bottle, it would have stayed on the ground. But you picked it up because you gave it your 100%. A lot of people through around the saying "Give everything your 100%". But just saying it is stupid, because there's no way to gauge the metric or actually apply it to real life. This course taught me one thing about it: when you give your 100%, there are no regrets. Regret is the yardstick one must use.

NOTE: THE OTHER FOUR RULES WILL BE ADDED LATER, AS THE TEACHERS ARE NOT WILLING TO CLARIFY THEM UNTIL THE FOLLOW-UP.

Physical Empowerment 

Social Empowerment, Emotional Empowerment, and Mental Empowerment was encompassed in the Five Golden Rules, However, physical empowerment wasn't. Physical empowerment was something that was taught to us through yoga and meditation.

The two types of yoga we were taught were the Surya Namaskar, and various Pranayams. The Surya Namaskar was what we started off lessons with, and did many reps and sets of them. It really is an all-body workout and can get stressful after a while.

Surya Namaskar

Instead of going through the process for the Surya Namaskar, I've uploaded some photos of us doing it here.

Pranayams

Before we learned how to do specific pranayams, we learned how to do ujjayi breaths, or breathing using the ujjayi technique. Think of it as exhaling with your mouth, but while your mouth is closed. We learned four types of pranayamas: belly breathing, candle blowing, bhastrika, and the concentration pranayam. The following video should show you the differences between them.

Sudrashan Kriya 

The Sudarshan Kriya is basically to be the one-stop-shop for fixing all of your problems. It essentially allows you to use the Law of Attraction (which was extensively profiled in The Secret). It's also a purification process, and detoxes the person who uses it of toxins that they collect. Really, it works.


Other Things

On the final day, we deviated from the usual schedule of life lessons and yoga and did some "fun stuff".

One of the things we did was a fashion catwalk show thing, and to the amusement of the others, the latter was my signature move:

We also had to do some "dancing" which was ridiculous. Thankfully, I was hidden behind other people.

At the end, we had to put plates behind our backs, and sign other people's plates. We were supposed to write a message on it for them.

And here we are at the very end:

The Art of Living Family ^


Videos

In case you missed the videos, here they are. The first one is about the pranayamas, and the second one is about the sudarshan kriya.

 Video
 Video 2