The art of living

I had the privilege of attending 7 day workshop on Art of Living sponsored by the company where I was working.The workshop was organized in the basement of the building where our office is located. All the participants were told not to drink, smoke,eat non vegetarian food, or take tea or coffee during the period of workshop. These were the pre conditions for attending the workshop.I had no difficulty in changing my habits as I was a vegetarian, non smoker and I didn’t drink. My only bad habit was that I used to take bed tea. Whenever I had to skip it, I got headache. However, on the very first day, guruji who was supposed to conduct the workshop introduced himself and gave us some background of the founder and the organization as a whole. He then asked us a very pertinent question. “Can you control your mind?’ . There was a big silence. We were all scratching our head trying to find out the correct answer. One person said” We can control it through yoga, another said
through meditation yet another said through concentrating at a point and so on and so forth. There were several other answers. Guruji was unimpressed. He was sitting with his eyes closed and listening patiently to everybody. After we all finished with our ideas, he opened his eyes gently and with a big smile he said “I am sorry gentlemen. You are all wrong”. The fact is that you cannot control your mind through any of the techniques you have just mentioned. The more you will try
to control it, the more it will wander. It is so restless that even when you are sleeping, your sub conscious mind is working continuously.A restless and uncontrolled mind is going to impact your physical health. You get afflicted with several disease. You lose creative thinking which comes only with relaxed mind..The only method by which you can control your mind is through controlled breathing and this is where Art of living comes in." We then learnt different Kriyas from him. The main objective of doing Kriya is to learn the technique of controlled breathing. In each Kriya,we were told to sit in a particular posture and take breathing inward and outward in a given time slot. The soft instrumental music was played in the background which was very pleasant to hear.After I finished one particular Kriya, I felt as if the current is flowing across my whole Body.My mind became relaxed, free of tension. It was an unusual experience for me.