22/06/2021
Yoga – The Powerful Mental Tool to Cure Ailments
Shreyasi Maiti in conversation with Renuka Vilampil, the Founder of Advaya exploring most effective yoga healing therapies for heart disease, arthritis, hypertension, diabetes, and lots more..
Being into a full-time corporate job; today a yoga teacher, enthusiast and entrepreneur; How did it happen in your life?
Yoga plays the most crucial part in changing my life. Earlier I used to work as a Freelancer Yoga Tutor. I used to take corporate sessions as well as individual classes. Yoga is my passion that has propelled me to become a teacher, practitioner, and a Yoga enthusiast. Today, in Kharghar I have opened my own studio in 2018 to create a space that felt like home - a warm and welcoming environment where people might come as they are regardless of any prior yoga experience, age, size, or degree of flexibility.
How practicing Yoga helps in healing and curing diseases?
Yoga, through the process of sincere practicing, will help you to find a healing journey that can radically shift you to a better life. When you feel pain, you feel disconnected from yourself and from our own body. The identification with wholeness and completion that yoga heralds is not only a result of connection to breath and movement of the body, but targets almost every area of the body – core, arms, legs, and back.
Regularly practicing yoga is a major source of healing and will completely cure several diseases that you can never think of – infact there are hardly be any disease yoga can’t help in controlling. Yoga helps in curing chronic ailments like diabetes, hypertension, hypothyroidism and hyperthyroidism, and polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS in women) by regulating metabolism and keeping all the organs of the body healthy and fit. Yoga therapy healing programs in Advaya bring relief and long-term cure to varicose veins, which for many people there are no symptoms. Practicing various yoga forms like the pranayam and anulom-vulomserve is the only sustainable cure for asthma.
Restless leg syndrome where there’s only pain without any other symptoms, inguinal hernia which includes pain and in many cases there are no symptoms - Yoga therapy can drive away these diseases permanently. People indulge in spending huge money and tremendous time on various treatments, but practicing Yoga will help in healing along with increasing core strength and will prevent hernia from recurring. Yoga is not only a Fitness program for weight loss. With praynayam we can cure skin diseases, herniated disk, frozen shoulders, Arthritis, Liver Problems, Lower back issues – If you are exhausted with doctors physiotherapists, Yoga asanas are highly effective solution to several medical conditions.
What is pure Yoga according to you?
Advaya is dedicated to serving yoga for every community by offering diverse yoga practices - Vinyasa, Hatha, Pre-Natal & more. We hold regular workshops and in-house training, and internal mentorship programme. In Advaya, you’ll be benefitted first-hand from regular yoga practices and are continuously encouraged to attend several yoga therapy workshops. For those interested in training outside the studio, we have developed an online yoga video platform; enabling anyone on the go to take their practice with them.
Advaya celebrates the diversity of yoga styles by offering a wide variety - traditionalists will rejoice in Hatha Yoga, Ashtanga, Pranayama and Meditation; contemporary practitioners will thrive on the likes of Power Yoga, Yoga with props. The three scenarios where I take personal sessions – Yoga Therapy, pre-natal and very advance courses.
Complementing this premium yoga experience are workshops with yoga teachers from around the globe, Trainings and retreats in idyllic locales that take yoga beyond the studio. The concept of Yoga shouldn’t blend with other diverse yoga forms or weight-loss dance programs like zumba classses. That’s why Advaya is practicing pure yoga as it never deviates into any other form of Yoga. The soul of yoga misses out if yogas, zumba and asanas - all blend together.
How Yoga played a significant role in your life?
As a small child being a dancer, I used to maintain my flexibility and I used to do Yoga. While growing up healthy, I found the issue of my abnormal twist in my leg and I was moreover suffering from overweight, for many months, the pain increased again. I kept on moving without realizing and after 1.5 years, I started realizing that this pain is controlling my life and the way I can’t move my body smoothly. Soon, I enrolled myself in a Yoga centre and after moving to India, I slowly started practicing my asanas and steadily I can feel my knee is healing. Where doctors and MRI scans frightened me for a knee replacement surgery; I started practicing Yoga as an alternative medicine which cured me perfectly.
What are the yoga styles for beginners and advance level in Advaya?
Beginners never feel intimidated because our teachers never forget they were once beginners too - going at your own pace is always encouraged. Advanced students can deepen their practice amidst people who have travelled the world, learning and sharing the joys of yoga.
Advaya is offering classes from all ranges of experience, from beginners to advance level as well as therapeutic and pre-natal/post-natal classes. Our intention is to provide an experience for you that you can take home in your daily life creating more awareness, peace and joy. Our classes are alignment based and we use various props which bring alignment, steadiness and depth into your practice allowing you to work within, and improve your range of motion, flexibility and mobility in a safe and effective way.
Advance yoga is more experiment with your breath, long practices of pranayama. As you progress easy postures, slowly you start attempting difficult and more demanding postures for flexibility. For that you need to take 3-6 months of asana practice. Advance yoga is how you manipulate and control your body.
Special message on International Yoga Day
Irrespective of age, to start Yoga practice whether you’re 10 or 70 years old, if you're considering Yoga, don’t hold up for even 1 day and just find out a place to enlist yourself. Don’t think you’re too old or yoga for practicing yoga and if you’re blessed with a good yoga teacher that will help you.
At least practicing yoga twice a week will help you. One should understand that you’ve to find a good teacher and the right instructor for yoga. It is about balancing your senses, balancing your body, soul and mind in order to live healthy and live in peace.
Wishing you a peaceful and healthy life on International Yoga Day. Yoga is the journey of the self, to the self, through the self. Happy Yoga Day!