Yoga – A way of life

Designing your life around your passion and what you deeply resonate with, is not easy. Making difficult career choices, making life choices which may sound naive to the people around you, not being able to see the light across the tunnel, but still being hopeful and moving forward in the dark. That’s what it takes to follow your heart.

It all comes to what matters to you. Is it a stable paying job where you feel discontent? or Is it working on something you truly believe in and practice yourself, the thing that makes your heart happy!

In the middle of the herd, there are always exceptions, the moonshots, the crazy ones, the ones who take that shot, which most of us are afraid to take. Leaving the stability and going for that alternate lifestyle which makes them feel fulfilled. Starting a company, Building an innovative product, Starting to Coach etc.

This story is from Priyamvada Mangal, a Freelance Yoga Coach and Journalist from Mumbai, India (Instagram).

She is a certified Yoga Coach and has been working to introduce Yoga to more and more people as a way of life, with her coaching. She is also a prolific writer with her writing pieces published in The Hindu, The Tribune, Manorama etc. As a journalist, she has worked with names like Mumbai Mirror and Firstpost. She’s worked on many photojournalism projects, her photography portfolio can be found here.

Since leaving her full-time job at a big media house couple of years back, she’s been working freelance and is well on the path of financial freedom. She usually provides one-on-one Yoga coaching, but now since Covid-19 hit all of us hard and restricted us inside the boundaries of our homes, she has started teaching Yoga online.

In this piece, she’s sharing how she first got introduced to Yoga and shares about her transition from a traditional journalism career to the freelance writing and Yoga Coaching. She also shares the Yoga way of life that changed her lifestyle and how she’s helping others now to discover this alternate way of life with her Yoga Classes.

[This story is part of the Lifestyle Design in Action series]

Enters Priyamvada Mangal

The first time I did yoga was when I was 13 and visited the yoga institute for a children’s camp, since then I have been doing Yoga on and off but I never really made it a part of my daily lifestyle until 2018.

For my extra credit for honors at St Xavier’s (in 2012), I chose to do the course on Zen Buddhism which also included Zen meditation. In the same year in the Diwali break, I went for a Vipassana course at Gorai. I have done almost 10 courses and each one helped me in its own way.

After an internship at Mumbai Mirror Online and working at Firstpost as a journalist for a while, I started freelancing in 2018, so I had the time to pursue things I wanted to do and learning Yoga was one of them.

I did an Inner Engineering course from Isha and shortly after, a teacher’s training course at The Yoga Institute in Santacruz. After joining the institute, I realised that health is something that reflects in your personality – it is about eating right (Ahar), having the right kind of recreation (Vihar), having the right kind of routine (Achar) and the right kind of thoughts (Vichar).

1. Ahar – eating Sattvik food, good quality, moderate quantity and specific to the season and individual body type. Sattvic foods include seasonal foods, fruits, cow milk products (which are ethically sourced), nuts, seeds, oils, ripe vegetables, legumes, whole grains and non-meat based proteins.
2. Vihar – recreation and routines including 5 Niyamas which are Saucha(purity), Santosha (contentment), Tapas(self-discipline), Svadhyaya(self-study) and Ishvara Pranidhana (surrender to a higher source).
3. Achar – our behaviour with the world making sure we follow the 5 Yamas – Ahimsa (non-violence), Satya (Truth), Asteya (non-stealing), Brahmacharya (moderation in sensual pleasures) and Aparigraha (non-stealing).
4. Vichar – our outlooks toward life.

Without these four pillars, our lifestyle is not going to be holistic. So to improve one’s lifestyle, one has to work on all aspects including diet, movement and sleep.

Health is not only physical but also mental, emotional and spiritual.

After making yoga a part of my daily lifestyle, I sleep much better, feel hungry at the right times, eat the right kind of food because I am in tune with what my body needs. Good sleep automatically improves my energy and attention the next day.

Now, I also have a lot of time to work on things that matter to me so I have started teaching more students and I write more frequently about wellness.

How is it possible that after devoting a few hours to Yoga (this includes meditation) one has more time to do things? This is because yoga has helped me clear out my mind from the thoughts that are not important, so automatically the priority goes to the beneficial thoughts, I do not take much effort to make a to-do list and check things off it effortlessly.

To start working on whatever it is that is important to you, first, you need to have clarity and right after that comes focus.

I always wanted to learn how to cook but I somehow kept pushing it saying that I will cook in the next year – that will be a part of the next year’s resolution. But after learning about the Patanjali’s first Yoga Sutra – Atha Yoganushasanam – Now begins the practice of Yoga – I realized the importance of NOW – so I made sure to use this knowledge to START cooking. I finally did it after postponing for years.

Yoga also taught to be thankful! We need to pause and acknowledge all the blessings. We tend to ignore the good because we concentrate on what we don’t have – on things we lack. This leaves us frustrated, dissatisfied and increases the levels of our stress. Making sure that we thank whoever we believe in for all the good things in life and be grateful for all the good people in life automatically reverses the feeling of constant lack and helps us to focus on the good. The byproduct of which is lowering in the stress levels. This opens doors for opportunities and blessings.

When I started teaching, I took personal classes for the people close to where I live. I always wanted to launch my classes online but somehow since I was satisfied, I kept delaying it. Lockdown allowed me to launch my classes online and reach people in the US, Lucknow, Hyderabad, Ranchi, etcetera.

Motivation keeps me on my track, the kind of positive impact I create in my life and the lives of my students is something that reflects. The happiest moment for me is when my mom started learning Yoga from me in December 2019 and today its a part of her daily lifestyle.

I believe that any kind of blockage that you have in life is because we do not use our mind and intelligence effectively or we do not apply what do you know in our daily lives. It could also be that we have a tendency to the wrong kind of things and we have not yet got in the path for clear thinking.

That is where something as holistic as yoga comes in because yoga teaches you to work on yourself, your mind, body and breath no matter how bad the external circumstances. It drops the idea of trying to forcefully change the world but focuses on – the evolution of YOU as an individual no matter how bad you think the world is.

5 Yoga tips for people who are reading this –

1. Start with any kind of movement which incorporates mind-body-breath for at least 20 minutes in a day. Preferably after cleaning your stomach in the morning, on an empty stomach.
2. Deep breathing and breath observation.
3. Eat when you are hungry and try to minimise binge eating, snaking, munching as it confuses your digestive system
4. Switch off phones an hour before bed to sleep better. Switch on phone only an hour after waking up to have a more productive day.
5. Try and minimise loading your family members with your work. Try and do all your work by yourself as much as possible

P.S.: If you want to get online Yoga Coaching or want to know learn more about Yoga way of Life, you can DM Priyamvada on her Instagram handle.

Quick afterword from Himanshu:

If you want to read a book, you judge it by its cover, the description at the back and the index. Think of your life as a book, zoom out a bit, think how can you create major chapters of your life as the index of your own life’s book. This framework is called Lifestyle Design. This will include hard questions –

• Where you want to live?
• What work you want to pursue?
• Which relations you want to keep?
• What ambitious dream you have?

We all know life is uncertain. But with a thoughtful Lifestyle Design, you can at least create a framework for your life so that it moves in the right direction.

This reminds me of a quote from Naval on this topic –

The ideal life would be one where you had a hobby that as a byproduct made you money, you had a hobby that as a byproduct kept you healthy, you had a hobby that as a byproduct made you smarter and more creative

– Naval Ravikant

What’s your passion around which you want to design your life?

Please share in the comments below.

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