I don’t normally do yoga, and I’ve only done yoga a couple times before partaking in this event, but I had heard so much about the benefits of yoga. My parents, who grew up in India and regularly did yoga, and my friends back home who go to Corepower every week all frequently urged me to do yoga, so I decided to try it out. And it was awesome. The actual experience of doing yoga was painful and difficult. I’m not flexible, so doing every pose- from the warrior positions to the lotus position, was extremely painful. But by the end of the event, when I was doing the Shavasana pose, I felt very calm. My mind was still and at peace and I felt the benefits of yoga that all my friends had told me about.

Such a calming experience prompted me to look into why yoga was so beneficial to so many people. In sanskrit, yoga means “union”. This helped me make sense of why yoga was such a calming experience. Lots of times when I study, I feel very restless. My mind and my body are in two different places, and that makes it a lot harder to study. My head and my body are in two different places, and it makes me much less calm and my mind much more chaotic. However, through yoga I felt much different. Yoga forced me to do difficult poses that strained my body and had me focus on my breath while doing each pose. Through doing this, it helped establish a union between my body and mind, which was why I felt so calm.