Loving your body with yoga

Yoga was not popular in the capital city until a few years ago, when people started to realize the benefits of practicing it. Since then, yoga centers have flourished and the number of yogi and yogis has increased.

The physical exercises, breathing techniques and mind control practices, originating from India, draw enthusiasts and have become a new trend in town.

For some people, yoga is not only an exercise, but also a way of life. Devi Asmarani, a yogi and freelance writer, is among those who have chosen yoga to stay healthy and fulfilled.

During a book launch at Gramedia book store in Grand Indonesia shopping mall recently, Devi said she turned to yoga in the hope of healing her health problems back in 2004.

Working as a journalist gave her a stressful life. This was exacerbated by her active smoking habit. As a result, she was prone to mood swings, gastric problems and migraines.

After getting some information about a relaxed style of yoga, she instead tried a more dynamic yoga that featured challenging postures. The benefits of the practice increased her curiosity to learn more about yoga.

She searched for more information and learned from various yoga teachers to satisfy her thirst for yoga knowledge.

Devi, who decided to quit her job as a correspondent for Singapore’s English daily newspaper The Strait Times in 2008, said she never meant to teach yoga when she was learning it.

Her love and passion in the discipline, however, drove her to share her knowledge. She wrote articles on yoga every two weeks for The Jakarta Post for two years until a friend last year told her to publish a book about yoga in Indonesian.

In her book, Yoga Untuk Semua (Yoga for All), she shares her experiences in yoga, discusses yoga philosophy as well as answering some frequently asked questions related to the exercise.

The title clearly represents the content of the book, which mostly discusses a branch of Hatha yoga and focuses on physical postures, or asana, and breathing techniques, or pranayama.

“There is no such thing a ‘best kind’ of yoga. You should try several varieties of yoga to know which one suits you,” she said.

Devi starts the book with an overview of the history of yoga. The book further discusses the importance of breathing and describes some breathing techniques. There is sitali and sitkari, two breathing techniques that use the mouth. These two techniques help the body to cool down when overheated and they also ease thirst and hunger.

In the breathing chapter, she underlines that yoga practitioners should not hold their breath or force their bodies into certain poses.

Yoga poses, or asana, receive the biggest amount of space in the book, complete with pictures of every posture. Mindful meditation and compassionate meditation are also discussed along with solutions to deal with temptations, such as sleepiness, boredom, pain and cramps.

Another interesting part of this book, which also comes with a CD, looks at the various yoga postures that are suited for people in different sports, such as tennis players, golfers, mountain climbers, futsal players, cyclists and runners.

Devi said everybody can start practicing yoga, even in their old age. “The less flexible your body, the more you need yoga,” she said.

With the negative combination of high-level stress and bad lifestyle habits so common in big cities, yoga may become an option to stay healthy.