Corporate Life and Spiritualism

I am a management professional and have been taking keen interest in development programs. Regular readers of my blogs and my friends would recall the Firewalk that I undertook and learning I drew from it.

I recently attended the 4-day residential Inner Engineering Program at the Isha Yoga Foundation’s Ashram in the foothills of the scenic Velliangiri Mountains near Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu, India.

The Foundation has been established by Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev and has millions of followers in India and around the world.

At 40, and having spent 18 years in the corporate world, I felt it was the right time to get initiated into spirituality. Why do I say so?

First, with experience and age comes maturity. We have been through complex social interactions and situations. We have seen birth and death, success and failure, happiness and sadness, health and illness; we have been through it all. This maturity and experience makes it relatively easy to connect with and understand the discourse on spirituality.

Second, we accumulate mental and emotional baggage by this age, which limits our experience of life. It clouds our perception. There is a tendency to see life through the prism of our experiences, not simply how it really is. How to do away with this baggage?

Third, we notice some personality traits that we would like to do away with, like anger. We wish to live with joy, but find ourselves jealous and frustrated on occasions. There is therefore a conflict between what we ought to be and what we really are. This takes away our peace of mind, our joy. Our personality stinks.

In this backdrop, I decided to be a part of the Inner Engineering Program at the Isha Yoga Foundation. And what an experience it was!

The first benefit that immediately accrued to me was – I started feeling more peaceful, more at-ease with myself. Second, I began doing regular Yoga, making me fitter. Third, my need for food and sleep subsided. The tendency to overeat or eat several times a day went away, as the time-gaps prescribed for Yoga required discipline. Fourth, I came closer to Mother Nature. I can’t recall when I last undertook a forest trek or bathed under a waterfall. Bliss!

So what did the Program do?

Well, I would term the Program as an overhaul, not only of our body (with set diet, massage and a time-bound Yoga schedule) but also of our mind (with intense and interactive sessions on several key aspects of spirituality duly interspersed with excellent video-talks by Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, founder of the Foundation). We were initiated into the Shambhavi Mahamudra, a 21 minute Kriya that brings an equilibrium between our body, mind, emotions and energies.

A point to note is, the Foundation doesn’t prescribe any particular religion. Believer of any religion can participate in the Program.

After returning from the Ashram, alongside sticking to my Yoga schedule, I have also been watching a lot of videos of Sadhguru on YouTube to enhance my understanding. I am providing links to some of the very interesting ones below.

To conclude, I am very happy that Inner Engineering happened to me. While we have spent considerable time and energy to set the outside world right, we have not made efforts to engineer our inner self, which is actually what matters most. We must undertake the program to set right what we have neglected till now.

Some interesting videos : Sadhguru

1. MIT Conference 2012

2. Sadhguru and Javed Akhtar Debate on Spirituality

3. Sadhguru Speaks at World Economic Forum