I grew up in India, in the Himalayan Mountains, in the old summer capital of the British Colonials when they ruled India. Living 8,000 ft. up in the mountains, my influences and education were from the West with Irish Nuns in a convent school, and preparatory college also run by the nuns. The focus was on a liberal education, and cultivation of the “fine-nesses” of Western life for the mostly wealthy girls who would ultimately marry well-established, eligible bachelors, and run a stylish Westernized home.
In my home, however, my professional parents kept us in touch with our roots, deep in traditional India, with the celebration of Indian rituals, yogic ethical values and customs, along with our westernized lifestyle. My father practiced yoga each morning, and I imbibed a lot of it from him without even trying to. My father was my first and only teacher. He never felt he was an instructor, but gave me his discoveries with yoga in a gentle, low-key way that made me want to experiment with it on my own. My mother didn’t really do the physical stretches, but she meditated daily on a regular basis, and carefully observed the devotions and charity works that are such an important part of yoga.
There were many years following, when I did not continue with the yoga practice on a regular basis, but about 15 years ago, I started practicing again, instructing classes, and finding that I was deeply interested in discovering how yoga with its intuitive moves could keep a body in top condition, physically and mentally; it’s ability to quickly heal discomforts and diseases that are bound to affect the body and the mind from time to time. About ten years ago, I took a Vedantic ‘initiation’, and have since practiced meditation on a regular basis. There is a ‘stillness’ that meditation brings to the practitioner - it makes me feel as if I am the pilot of a spaceship that is my life, but I can keep it on a steady course as I hurtle through this often times stormy journey.
Through good and bad times, I have personally found that Yoga has provided me with a constant sense of well-being or euphoria, that keeps me on a perpetual “high”. I notice that I am rarely sick, and almost never catch those endless colds and other sicknesses that seem to affect most of us. The occasional aches and pains are quickly worked out of the system with the powerful stretches.
It is this certainty that I can help impart this quality to your life – good health, good spirit, and a quietness that comes through the practice of regular Yoga, which motivates me to teach yoga. My students include adults of all ages who are healthy and trying to find a way to stretch and distress; elementary and middle school children; pregnant women; older students who are trying to stay healthy as they age and begin to feel some twinges in various parts of their body, senior citizens who are in wheel-chairs and needing to stretch their bodies to prevent atrophy and degeneration.
Students often come with a physical need, but stay for what it does to their spirit.
Sipra Pimputkar
