Spiritual Vacation

Recently, I took Yes+ course offered by Art of Living Foundation. I was fortunate enough to get a student scholarship which waived off the otherwise exorbitant fees. Anyhow, it was a four day workshop distributed as 3.5-7-7-3.5 hours from Fri through Monday.

The course revolved around breathing techniques and few philosophical topics that directly dealt with our day to day lives. The group was small enough to remember everyone’s names and large enough to hide behind someone during Q n A!!

The four days felt like a spiritual/mental vacation although it was in a community center of University Housing. The breathing techniques taught over there included:

1.       Ujjai (victory breath)

2.       Praanaayam

3.       Bhastrika

4.       Sudarshan Kriya

We played games at the start of each session. The games were intended to bring forth behavioral aspects of humans in day to day activities (dealing with people and environment in general). A casual ambience let people interact easily without any inhibition. The instructors were extremely polite and suave. They urged us to question their statements. They were eager to get comments on preceding discussions and were more than happy to answer without putting anyone down. They kept things on time too.

On one of those days we had to decide on and go for a community service project. We were given one hour to decide a project and two hours to execute it on the following day. I will write about the service project in a dedicated blog.