Yes, Anyone can Do Yoga (Devi Asmarani’s Book Launch)

Devi Asmarani in the book signage session. She inscribed "Dear Akhlis! Stay healthy and joyful". But I was literally moved as like no one else, she spelled my name correctly!

Yoga is indeed meant to be practiced by all. Regardless of  how skinny or obese you can be, how rigid or plastic your body is, how young or old you are, yoga keeps benefiting anyone doing it.

As for me, yoga caught my attention by accident. It looks like gymnastics, a kind of sport I was excelled at in high school. But it’s different. I can’t tell you what the differences I’m talking about are. I’m a novice myself, who has started practicing as recent as less than a year (around 8 months). The bottomline may be I nearly always feel better after each class.

Your body is a temple, a ‘sacred’ laboratory

Touche! Just a great quote from Devi. Unlike some people who think like John Mayer (“Your body is a wonderland”, where everyone and anything can enter, have fun with no apparent limit, binge, get drunk, litter and go away), I am absolutely in line with the proposition that our body IS obviously a temple, a shrine.

Feeling a bit curious because of my own natural and genetic propensity of having slightly-above-average  flexibility and underweight issue, I decided to cast a question. So basically I just wanted to know what yoga can give people with these ‘enviable’ issues (as I asked the question, a middle-aged lady ‘offered’ me to be her fats donor *floored*).

Devi explained people with issues (or ‘blessings’ as she put it)  like mine, are supposed to be aware of the possibility of injuring him/herself. Doing several challenging poses quite effortlessly doesn’t necessarily mean you’re ‘the man’!  So this is why yoga also teaches us to be humble. Humility applies both for ‘freshmen’ or ‘professors’.

Also, Devi mentioned one thing I can relate to:

“Flexibility and strength rarely come in the same package”

But further on Twitter, she assured me that strength, fortunately, is trainable.

After the launch, I ran into Iwan Setyawan, the author of “9 Autumns 10 Summers”. Because we already knew each other on Twitter (Rhein Mahatma mocked us as he found out our Twitter avatars show me doing scorpion pose and Iwan peacock pose at the same time). The universe works in an unexpected way…

Namaste…(The divine in me honors the divine in you)

Devi's "Yoga untuk Semua" (Yoga for All)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I came 50 minutes late and got a rear seat thanks to Meta who would rather stand up to chat with her fellow yoginis.