Sivananda Yoga Experience

In the past years, I exposed myself to all sorts of practices. Mostly yoga, with the help of the app called Down Dog. It was more like an exercise, rather than a spiritual practice.

Then I heard from so many people that meditation is supposed to help in stressful jobs to regulate the nervous system. And without much search, I found Headspace, another app that would help me with the meditation topic.

In both, yoga & meditation, I saw the common denominator, which is breath. I was lucky to have Jakob (Bhava Breath) in my personal network, booked a breath-coaching session (that I wrote about here) and learned about pranayama.

All of those individual puzzle pieces, helped me to a certain extend to become more flexible, calm my mind and regulate my nervous system with the isolated techniques they incapsulate, which helps a great deal in my life as an office worker that sits a lot, works in a high pace environment and does that for long hours a day.

Funny enough, it was during my last business trip to India, that I got more curious about the philosophy of yoga and the many parts it consists of. My Manager encouraged me to learn more about the holistic nature of yoga, starting with the sun salutation and certain mantra’s its accompanies with and shared me this learning journey of Surya Namaskar (Sun salutation in Sanskrit), which made me even more curious about the more comprehensive philosophy of yoga and combining the many puzzle pieces I’ve learned about individually.

I started to research and found a Sivananda Yoga Ashram in Kitzbühel, Tirol, which offered a super easy and flexible way of signing-up, joining them for a week of daily practices.

The daily practices included all of the puzzle pieces I’ve mentioned earlier and more:

• 6 am: meditation (including mantra’s)
• 8 am: yoga (including pranayama)
• 12 pm: yoga philosophy (any topic of interest such as Chakra’s, Mantra’s, Meditation, or the influence of food on the daily practice (e.g. alcohol, coffee, meat, sugar etc.)
• 4 pm: yoga (including pranayama)
• 8 pm: meditation (including mantra’s)

Seeing that yoga is a lifestyle, or rather a universe of knowledge and practices that help to live a life of contentment, made me really curious and motivated me to fully embrace what I’ve learned so far.

The nice thing about the Sivananda Ashram experience is, that all the knowledge was immediately put into practices: Yoga is doing.