Yoga: A fascinating alternative to medication

By Fathima Riznaz Hafi

Originating from ancient Indian philosophy, yoga has been in existence for centuries. It is a mind and body practice whereby a combination of physical postures, breathing techniques and meditation contributes to the healing or general well-being of a person.

There are numerous styles of yoga and among them is ‘Kundalini yoga’ which is considered the most comprehensive of yoga traditions. It is also known as the yoga of ‘awareness’ as its focus is on self-awareness and delivering an experience of one’s highest consciousness.

The Weekend FT met up with yoga instructor Fiona Raymond, a lovely lady who spoke very passionately of her love for Kundalini yoga. Having left the country when she was only a toddler, she lived in the UK where she worked as a solicitor practising Human Rights Law. Upon discovering yoga she is now so immersed in it she seems to talk about nothing else. Fiona returned to Sri Lanka nine years ago and has been teaching Kundalini yoga to people young and old all this while. Following are excerpts from the interview:

Q: Where did you learn yoga and what inspired you to learn it and then teach it?

A: I started practising yoga when I was in university. It had been relaxing – I enjoyed it and then afterwards I practiced when I was a lawyer but I had never thought of doing it as a job – it never occurred to me.

Then I went to Ecuador, South America to live and my Spanish teacher there asked me whether I did yoga and I said yes; then she took me to a class – it was my first ‘Kundalini’ class and I just fell in love with it and started doing it every day. After a few months she said to me, “Would you like to do ‘teacher training’? And I said, “Are you nuts? I can’t even speak the language.” Then she said, “You’ll really enjoy it; why don’t you just try and I’ll help you.” So I started the course and I loved it! It was really challenging doing it in Spanish but I loved it.

Right now I’m an intern on teacher training but this year I hope to qualify as a full professional teacher trainer. I’ve got a few more courses to do in India this year and again in France and then after that I’ve been asked to join my teachers to go around South-east Asia doing teacher training; so I’m really excited about that.

Q: You don’t practice law anymore?

A: No; and I don’t want to. I never thought I’d teach but now I think for me it’s the most beautiful vocation I can do. It’s something that I feel is so helpful to people and it’s been amazingly helpful to me. I remember how stressed I was when I was a lawyer. I really did not have any techniques to cope with stress, to cope with clients, to cope with everything that was happening to me but now I feel so blessed that I’ve been given this gift and that’s why I want to help other people to have this ability to learn and use this technology.

Q: What is ‘Kundalini Yoga’?

A: Kundalini Yoga is ‘Raj’ yoga (like ‘King’ yoga). It’s a scientific tool-box given to us, for the everyday house-holder to be able to incorporate yoga into their lives to help them with stress. Everyone is stressed, including yoga teachers. If you have loads and loads of things in a day, just naturally your nervous system goes into something called the sympathetic nervous system and you start feeling a level of stress. Kundalini yoga gives you very simple tools and techniques on how to deal with that.

So if I start feeling stress I know immediately how to deal with that. I start working on my breath, I start breathing in through my diaphragm and that brings my brain waves down from the beta to the alpha then delta to beta.

Beta is when you’re in deep sleep. You’re very relaxed at deep sleep. Then when your brain waves start coming down and you start changing your breath techniques, your emotions are purely led by this blood chemistry that’s happening within you. You learn how to alter that.

Q: So is Kundalini yoga only for dealing with stress or can it be used for other purposes such as for physical fitness like to lose weight?

A: Yoga originally means union. So of course it’s to do with the body. The body is very important – it’s our link to our subconscious and unconscious brain – it’s vital. So you can only really work on your mind, emotions or stress through the body, through the breath and through other things other than the mind. So yes we do work from the body. But principally even things like losing weight, having more willpower, to resist chocolates or bad things or learning what’s good for me personally. What’s good for me may be completely different from what’s good for you.

Now more and more science is looking at specific things for specific people. So someone might have diabetes because he eats too much fat; someone else might have diabetes because he eats too much starch. It’s really that specific now.

So what this does is it also teaches us how to be really supersensitive to what we need. Yoga is not like aerobics. If you want to lose weight you can go and do aerobics; there are so many other physical things you can do but if you want to really sustain that weight and learn to be conscious about what you eat and learn to be conscious about what’s going to sustain, what’s going to nourish you and what’s going to make you feel happy, healthy, holy – that’s when you come to yoga! And every yoga practice has that!

Any yoga practice that just does some sort of aerobic activity is not yoga. It’s stretching or aerobics – different things for different people. I’m not saying any of those things are bad I’m just saying please go and do lots of physical fitness – it’s very important but yoga has a special element to it and you’ll get that in any yoga class that’s a real yoga class.

Q: Illnesses like migraines, epilepsy and stammering are connected to the brain. Can yoga help in any way?

A: Absolutely! There’s something called one-minute breath. It’s very difficult to do but you can learn it over time. It’s literally inhaling for 20 seconds – holding the breath for 20 seconds and exhaling for 20 seconds. And that, if done regularly for about 11 minutes a day, can change the grey matter. The frontal lobe then starts reacting in a different way to the medulla oblongata which is the old brain. They start connecting.

Stammering is again something neurological and has got something to do with stress. When some people get stressed they can’t get the words out. Yoga helps with ADHD too; all of these things can be worked on mainly through the body again. We get children to do things like working on the left and right sides of the body. Also the children use different asanas that make their muscles really pressed together; working on different meridian points and that also helps with ADHD.

Yoga helps with Alzheimer’s as well. They’ve just done a study with some of my teachers in the US. They put them in MRI machines and they got them to do a meditation where they chant a specific mantra. The DNA has tails – these tails get shorter as they get older. When you do this meditation the tail then extends again.

The science is so deep. Yoga dates back to at least 100,000 years so you can imagine the body of work there is and they’re just rediscovering lots of stuff now. Even studying this for the last 13 years I still have a lot to learn.

Q: Can it help with strokes?

A: Not strokes; with strokes – it’s blood pressure. It’s more of a ‘prevention’ thing. Doing long deep breathing, different breath techniques really help reduce the blood pressure and therefore prevent the stroke.

Q: So, it’s more in terms of prevention. Once it’s done it’s done?

A: Yes. Once a stroke is done it’s done but afterwards for rehabilitation especially working on left and right hemispheres – getting them to start working together, it’s yoga! We do lots of work – brain work. And even doing all these asanas, what we don’t realise is they are also working very deeply on the brain and the organs – the nervous system, glandular system, everything.

In Bangalore there’s a university where you can do a degree; a Masters or a PhD in yoga. Science and yoga are coming together and that’s giving us the most amazing toolbox. It’s going to be the thing in the future. Now it’s just fashionable; just because you’ve got Madonna and people who look good doing it. But soon you’re going to realise that what yoga does is it makes you be at your best; it brings out the individual, the wonderful thing in you. You don’t have to be like Madonna, you don’t have to be like some star – you just have to be you, you have to love yourself, you have to understand what you need for yourself and through that you can really change your life.

Q: People are intimidated by the way the body stretches to far ends. Are there any risks of injury from the stretching and other movements?

A: Absolutely. That’s why you should go to a qualified yoga teacher. We’re all taught things like for example, if someone’s got high blood pressure they shouldn’t do inversions; if someone’s got lower back pain they shouldn’t go straight into really complicated back bends. There’s a series. When you’re born you can’t read can you? It takes time. It’s the same with yoga – it’s step by step by step. What I say in class is: ‘You’re not here to prove – you’re here to improve’.

Q: Are yoga classes very costly?

A: Yes; generally yoga is more expensive than aerobics, etc. We have a range of classes; we have a free class every Wednesday morning; it’s very early – it’s from 5 to 7:30 a.m. and it’s completely free – always has been. It’s called ‘Sadhana’. We have other classes ranging from Rs. 700 to Rs. 900 per session. I’m hoping to start another class soon and that will be at Rs. 500 per session because I don’t want to exclude any kind of sectors of society.

We are told to charge because it’s an energetic exchange. So I give you something through my teachings and you give me something. So we have to take something even if it’s a donation of Rs. 10 or Rs. 1 but it’s up to teachers really.

For me, I really want as many people to get to benefit from this technology and learn and help them through this difficult time where people are really in a lot of mental discomfort. So once you alleviate that, the body just works ‘for’ you – not ‘against’ you. Difficult things like tight areas in your body relax, illnesses start getting better and you start eating better naturally. You don’t want to eat sweet or oily food and if you do, you feel it and you know that ‘tomorrow I don’t want to do the same’.

But when you’re living in a very unconscious way and you’re not sensitive to what you need you’re just going to anything and you don’t notice what’s happening to your body.

Q: Tell us about your yoga classes for children. How does yoga benefit them? Do children find it difficult to pick up?

A: Oh my God. Children are so connected. Children especially those born nowadays are all about feeling and being. If you for example have an agenda in your mind or you’re angry, they can pick that up immediately.

They pick up yoga immediately. I have a class going on in Negombo for kids. I’ve got kids from about four years old up to 12 all in the same class – amazing. They all work together; obviously their attention spans are not as long as adults but they sit, they do all the asanas and all the breath work. We have much shorter meditations for them and we have more fun in storytelling – we do asanas through storytelling and we do lots of physical work because they like to do physical activity, running around to different places and doing some acro yoga; all sorts of things we mix up into this.

They’re very responsive. With children it’s really just about getting them to feel what they’re doing and being present and that’s so different nowadays; children are now growing up with all the social media – iPhones and all this kind of stuff so they are much more out of their heads – they’re in that cyber world – not in the physical world. What we’ve got to do is get children much more into their bodies, into their breath and what they’re doing.

It’s like how I’m sitting here talking to you and my full attention is on you – I’m not even concentrating on the cameraman or anyone else and that is what we need to do.

Yoga brings you back to being here now in the present moment because that’s the only thing that really exists. So our worries about the future and the past don’t exist. Our fantasies don’t exist. But this moment exists and when we work in this moment by being present and sensitive to what we need around us then the future just works out for itself. And we’re not trapped in our heads and worrying.

That’s what we teach children – we teach them all these emotional, mental and physical techniques that can help them deal with their life. It’s so important. That’s why I go all the way to Negombo to teach that class.

Q: Do you conduct kids’ classes here in Colombo as well?

A: Not presently because my schedules are full at the moment but I will definitely do one in the future.

Q: How many times a week should a person ideally come for classes and for how long per session?

A: Sessions are between 60 to 90 minutes. Once you start understanding yoga you start doing a bit of yoga. If you can then ask your teacher for a personal practice or if you ask me for example, then I’ll give you something written down, explaining everything you need to do, we’ll run through it and then maybe if you come to a class once a week that’s perfectly fine. And then you can continue with a general practice.

It’s very difficult nowadays; people are so stretched with time, they’ve got so much to do. I do have some people who come to two or three classes a week but I think it’s more and more difficult to attend that many classes. I’d say once a week and a personal practice.

I think it’s more important to have an everyday practice of something even if it’s a small asana series or some salutation in the morning, breath awareness during the day, consciously waking up to have a conscious day and consciously looking at your day and going to sleep – two very important paths. I think that’s more important than coming to classes.

That would be my recommendation for this sort of lifestyle we live.

If you had asked me a few years ago I would’ve said three times a week but now I think I’ve changed my mind. Much more important than having group classes is to have a personal practice; doing something every day for yourself.