Yoga guru Ira Trivedi: Yoga should become an essential part of people's lives, especially in this post-pandemic world

Today (21st June), people across the globe are celebrating International Yoga Day. This ancient tradition is India’s gift to humanity. Right from commoners to influential personalities and celebs, we have seen people including yoga in their daily routine. The contribution of yoga in leading a healthy life is immense and on the occasion of International Yoga Day, Yogi and writer Ira Trivedi shares how yoga is essential for every individual and can be a life saver in the tough time of the pandemic. Excerpts from the interview:

Why is yoga important in everybody’s life?

According to me, Yoga should become an essential part of people’s lives, especially in this post-pandemic world. We are living in a time when all sorts of viruses are flooding the planet from COVID to now Monkey Pox and we all have to keep ourselves safe and over immunity is a shield more than any vaccine and Yoga has scientifically proven that it is one of best practice to keep your respiratory system absolutely strong. It’s been a lot of research done during the pandemic and all results show that Yoga is and can be a life saver.

How important is yoga for children? What are the poses you recommend for kids?

Again very important, because we live in a modern age where kids are flooded with activity. Kids are flooded with screens. Kids are flooded with digital activity and the way for everyone to increase their focus is to do Yoga. Yoga again is scientifically proven to make a difference to your brain and our nervous system. Remember that Yoga fundamentally works on our spine and the spine is an extension of the brain so by allowing our kids to do Yoga at an early age, inculcate the practice of Yoga in children’s life at an early age, what we are in fact doing, is we are helping them with their neural development meaning their brain development.

How yoga helps in building immunity for all?

Yoga certainly helps built immunity by working on our lymphatic system. So our lymphatic system is a very important system that helps with immunity-boosting and draining the infection and viruses out from our body. So Yoga really helps with our lymphatic drainage through a lot of inversions, a lot of the twists that happen in Yoga. Also what ends up decreasing our immunity is increased stress levels. When our stress and anxiety is high our endocrine system moves out of balance and when the endocrine system goes out of balance our immunity gets directly affected So, by keeping our stress and anxiety level at bay, our immune system are boosted.

What is the best time to do yoga?

Anytime is the best time to do Yoga. But my preferred time is the morning because when you do Yoga in the morning, you can avail the benefits of Yoga all day. If you do it the night time Then you have less time to avail the benefits of Yoga. So I really feel that morning is always the best time to do Yoga.

What are the asanas you suggest for office goers?

Very simple. Neck exercises, shoulder exercises, and back exercises, you can do from the chair, can be immensely helpful to office goers because office goers face lot of problems from nack and back and carpal tunnel which is their fingers and their joints, this can really be helpful.

If you can suggest some quick asanas for those running short of time?

Absolutely. All you need is one asana a day. You don’t need more than that people think they have to do a lot of Yoga but that’s not the truth. Sometimes doing just one asana can be really nice for everyone. So I strongly suggest that one asana a day keeps the doctor away. So my favorite asana that I feel everyone should learn is the Shirsh asana, the headstand, that’s not always possible for everyone, so you can try Prasarita Padottanasana which is a wide-legged standing forward bend. For women, the fantastic asana is Dhanurasana, which keeps your reproductive system in check. A simple asana that can be done anytime anywhere is Tadasana.

How yoga helps in mental health?

Yoga is a boom for mental health because it helps with our stress levels. Our nervous system is made up of two different parts, the sympathetic nervous system, which controls the stress responses parasympathetic nervous system which controls the rest, and relaxation responses. What happens is that when we do Yoga the parasympathetic nervous system gets triggered and we automatically move into a state of rest and relaxation. I supposed to be in the sympathetic nervous system which is all about fighting a flight. The fight and flight mode that most of us are constantly in. There is this low-degree press that we are facing all the time because we are concerned, Oh my god, if someone is going to WhatsApp me, what’s happening on social media? there is this constant pressure that we are facing from incoming devices so, again, that Yoga does is it move us into the parasympathetic nervous system which then really helps with calming us down.

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