Sedona, AZ: There’s a rampant hunger for spiritual fulfillment in the Western world today. Now more than ever, people are reading books, attending lectures, workshops and retreats, seeking out healers, shaman, teachers and gurus. Just recently, internet servers were crippled as over 800 thousand people attempted to log on to the first of ten web seminars with Oprah Winfrey and spiritual author Eckhart Tolle. These are just some of the overwhelming indicators of an ever-increasing longing for meaning, equanimity and balance rising to the surface in the West.
While the mass market drive for “awakening” may be new, the concepts propounded by modern-day spiritual teachers like mindfulness, meditation and self-realization are not. And while the philosophies that surround these concepts have remained essentially unchanged for thousands of years, it seems that the modern world presents a particularly tricky set of obstacles to those who would incorporate them into daily life. How do we “live in the now,” free ourselves from grasping and ego, and develop true awareness in a manic, materialistic, distracting and demanding world? The answer might be yoga.
Yoga, the ancient science of stilling the mind, has made a huge comeback in the West. It just might, as the yoga masters of old promised, be the most tried and true pathway to enlightenment and to a happier, more peaceful life. The teachers at Sedona’s Devi Yoga see evidence of the power of yoga in their own lives and that of their students every day.
While yoga has been mainstreamed into just about every health club in every corner of the country, Devi Yoga offers an experience closer to yoga’s roots as a comprehensive system of living, of which the asanas or physical poses are just one component. Studio founder Sonali Gangadean is committed to maintaining an authentic experience for students, staying true to yoga’s roots while addressing the issues common to modern society, including healing physical ailments arising from overwork and under-rest and on the more subtle level, transcending negative emotions, depression and general malaise that plague our contemporary world.
The teacher is the philosophical foundation of practice at Devi Yoga, and the students are in good hands with Gangadean and her team. Yoga is literally in her genes, and she carries on a family legacy of practice and teaching from her grandfather, a renowned yogi. Since childhood, the philosophies of yoga have infused every aspect of her life, and she finds it enormously satisfying to see her students’ lives transform every day in the studio for the past seven years.
“Yoga is deeper than just some poses on the mat,” states Devi Yoga studio manager and teacher Natasha Zaslove. She points out that while the physical benefits such as a healthy immune system, increased energy and elevated moods are great, the real power of the practice lies in its ability to enable practitioners to “master the mind.” When we have mastered the mind,” states Zaslove, “we can create the life we desire and truly be of service.”
Devi Yoga teaches a style of yoga called Vinyasa. Vinyasa, a less structured form of the popular Ashtanga yoga, is based on a series of fluid, dynamic poses designed to stoke the body’s internal fire through breath, movement and concentration. “The biggest problem people have is a mind that’s constantly focused on the future or obsessed with the past,” says Zaslove. Like teachers spanning back over the centuries, Devi Yoga’s instructors use the millennia-old system of body and mind training to enable students to live more fully in the present moment and thereby still the mind.
