The Art Of Living : yes!+ program got finished today. It was a 4 days course at Yogi Sabhagriha, near Swami Narayan Temple, Dadar. The course was exclusively for young people between age groups 18 to 30. There were around 1000 participants. Thanks to Nimish for enrolling me for this course.    

It was an amazing experience! Before this course, I had just heard of Art of Living courses, their Sudarshan Kriya and of course about sri sri….

On the first day, we started with little bit of yoga which were light exercises… a sort of warm up. After that, 12 to 18 suryanamaskaras. The female named Anjana was very nice at keeping our enthusiasm on and making the whole activity interesting.

Then we got introduced to two amazing personalities, Bawa and Dinesh. They both took over the stage completely. Bawa is superb at talking. Both of them are graduates from IIT, Mumbai. Both are extremely knowledgeable, helping, down to earth and completely dedicated. As I said earlier, Bawa is superb in talking. He is quick witted. He is having superb convincing power. Of course, whatever he was telling was having strong base of sri sri’s teachings and his own understanding. So whatever he was saying, in form of speech or as answers, he was convincing. But he used to demonstrate it very nicely. for e.g. one boy said.. “I will try to do sudarshan kriya everyday“. Bawa asked him to come to stage and asked him to “try to pick up the apple kept there on stage“. Poor fellow picked it up. Bawa said.. “Don’t pick up.. TRY TO PICK UP“.. Everybody started laughing. Then he said “You never try to do anything.. You DO IT or DON’T DO IT! Simple“.

Sudarshan Kriya is a superb practice. Its just breathing. They play recorded music file which has repetitive SOHAM pronunciation. The word SOHAM is pronounced either in big cycle or medium cycle or in small cycle. When SO is pronounced, one has to inhale and when HUM, one has to exhale. Thats it! It goes for around about 25 minutes. But it has many physical effects on people doing it. Some people start crying, some laughing, some has finger cramps and what not. Basically its because strong emotional blast. Bawa jokingly calls it as “special effects”. I had cramps in my fingers. I had extreme nerve tension in head also. When Bawa asked us to lie down for sometime, to our surprise, we took rest for 45 minutes!!

We did sudarshan kriya for first 3 days out of four. “Special Effects” went on minimizing day by day!

There was a nice group of musicians including two fantastic singers. We heard very nice bhajans from them which are still playing in my ears.

Overall it was a very nice and refreshing experience. I have decided to do Sudarshan Kriya everyday. Lets see if I can maintain this. Bawa says “Don’t do kriya everyday.. do it only today!”

Related online wayouts from here :

Bawa and Dinesh’s blog : http://bawandinesh.blogspot.com

Art of Living : http://www.artofliving.org

Yes!+ Website : http://www.yesplus.org

His Holiness Sri Sri Ravi Shankar : http://www.srisri.org