Deep Shikha J.

When a lamp has many shades, the light is very dim and person may think is darker than it really is. When you take off the shades, you’ll see the center of light.

What may prevent one from seeing light are “impurities” of both body and mind.

There are various techniques that can be used when it comes to body - exercise (yogic asanas can be helpful, but also some other form of activity is good), changing the diet and cleansing the body from the toxins.

Then we can “work” on breath- diaphragmatic breathing should be practiced, nadi shodana and even some advanced pranayama techniques (but only under the surveillance of an experienced teacher)

Next comes the mind. After the breath exercise and cleansing the body from the excessive food and heavy metal remains, we may feel the effects on the mind. However, there are still much to be done. “Cleansing” of the mind can be more effective if the person is willing to change the perspective of looking at things. Negativity simply means an absolute believe in negative outcome. If person can only decrease a percentage of believe (negative one) and give it a little bit of hope, that can be a huge step forward. That’ll need a help of a close relative or a friend that depressed person has trust in.

Also Japa yoga can be included since it is good for the purification of the mind. Any mantra can be chosen to be repeated and person can start with repeating the AUM sound 21 times (7 times each letter- A,U,M).

These are only a few techniques that have helped people from my surroundings. It is not meant to be universal cure for the disease (especially when it comes to clinical depression), but it can produce amazing results.

The basic problem in my opinion is that the training required to be a competent yoga teacher is equivalent to a master's degree. No matter how good a 200hr program is, it's just not enough. The good teachers go way beyond that. I'm assuming that the counter point would be, "a 200hr is just a starting point, of course you're supposed to keep learning." But that's not the conversation around them. They're presented as a qualifying experience.

Everyone wonders what their purpose on this Earth is, why and how they, and all of life were created. There is an answer but it is something that is currently hidden from us. Many people have turned to science to answer life's difficult questions, but still science cannot answer these questions because science can only work within the frameworks of logic and the 5 senses. One hundred years ago, if you told someone there were invisible waves flying through the air and going through you, you would be considered crazy, but this is the reality that we live in with WiFi, radio waves, etc... So just because we cannot perceive something with our 5 senses, doesn't mean it does not exist. Therefore the only way to perceive these things is to become aware of them by focusing and turning inward. As humans, we have forgotten that we ourselves are a piece of life, we think we are something greater than life, that we have abstracted ourselves from life, but we cannot escape that we are simply just another piece of life, as wonderful and magnificent as any other piece of life. If you focus on life hard enough, you can learn to understand what it is and how it works. So yoga is a tool to help us turn inward, to focus on our own lives, to remind ourselves that we are a magnificent piece of life, both as beautiful and complex as any other piece of life. If we can learn to understand our own bodies, our own mind, then we can learn to make ourselves into a piece of life exactly the way we want it to be, by understanding who and what we truly are. This is why I practice yoga, to turn inward, to understand my purpose in life and to engineer myself to live the best life possible that I can