This is an exerpt from a blog post I wrote when I traveled through India for the first time. I was still a novice yoga pupil but it was on this journey that I started my daily practice. I just recently found this post online by accident again and it almost brought tears to my eyes when I read it almost 9 years later.
In those years I became I mother, a certified Iyengar yoga teacher and I’m just about to go to Pune to for my first monthly visit to the RIMYI the Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute. These pictures are from my trip 9 years ago and also from my last trip when I went to Pune for the first Yoganasunam in 2014, which was taught by Geeta Iyengar.
THURSDAY, 14th FEBRUARY 2008
On Sunday I finally started the Yoga intensive course in Rajpur (Dehradun). I already learned a lot. Most importantly I learned the true meaning of Yoga which so often is missing in the teachings of the west. Yoga is the science of transcendence and the aim of yoga is to look inside and see the changes within yourself. Be the seer in every yoga session and observe yourself. But also take whatever you learn in yoga and integrate it into your daily life.
I’m really happy to be here, if I ever start teaching yoga, this will give me so much more understanding. One thing I was not really aware of is how unknowingly I started getting some information together for my studies on death and how our attitudes and fears impact the relationships in moments of death.
How different cultures and religions impact the way we look at death. I realized that we go through some state of death in a lot of different stages of life. Some parts of our personalities die during our lifetime. But why do we fear death? Why are we too scared to talk about it? Most of the things we value in our life, we will lose after death. We believe that our life is here to collect things of the material plane. Things to stimulate our senses. How much time do we spend experiencing ourselves? How much time have we used to look inward? Who are we, if we take away the things on the material plane? Think of what is left of you. Can you find your true personality? I’m not Petra the blond girl with the blue eyes if you take away my body. The thing left is my soul, but what is the soul? This is the journey of Yoga (or Yog, as the Indians call it).
