Backache and stress are said to be the problems of the century. “All our senses are constantly aggressed in today’s world. Our eyes, hands, ears, nose and mouth have to deal with all kinds of pollution,” explains Daniel Lai Fang, a tai chi teacher. In this more and more aggressive world, people are looking for ways to relax.

Yoga, tai chi or rei-ki are among the most popular techniques and can really help manage stress and psychosomatic problems. “Some people try to make you believe that yoga can replace medicine. This is absolutely not true. Yoga can’t do miracles. But it can help modern medicine in some ways,” Trilo Gujadhur, a yoga expert, points out. “If yoga could cure everything, there would be no hospitals or pharmacies in India,” he adds with a touch of humour.

Trilo and his wife, Shiksha, have been teaching yoga for years. The couple set up an association, Ackbar Yoga, aimed at making yoga accessible to the largest possible number of people. They are now trying to make the authorities recognise that yoga can help in a number of diseases such as diabetes and asthma. They have been giving free yoga classes to people suffering from these conditions and organisations such as the United Nations have recognised the benefits of the activity “but there has been no follow-up so far.” If there were a special authority to control all “alternative medicines”, there would be fewer rip-offs and people proclaiming themselves “miracle-workers”.

Trilo Gujadhur will be giving yoga courses on the occasion of the “wellness week” at the Royal Palm between the 3rd and 10th of December. According to the former hotel manager, Jean-Pierre Chaumard, “a very important number of regular guests seek his advice and often invite him to their countries to export his techniques.”

<B>The importance of breathing</B>

Yoga could be described as the most ancient science that can help cure modern pain. The word “yoga” is the Sanskrit equivalent of the English “union.” The aim of such a discipline is to achieve union of mind and body. “People often go and see the doctor who tells them they are not suffering from any disease but simply need to relax. A yoga teacher can help them feel better; yoga must be taught to make the body work as it was meant to.”

The simple fact of sitting in a bad posture can harm the joints and lead to more severe problems that can be solved with yoga. “Thanks to a number of postures, yoga helps irrigate some parts of the body, which are not used to being irrigated and this leads to better circulation.” In fact the ultimate goal of yoga is to relax the body so that the muscles achieve perfect harmony.

But relaxation alone is not enough for a person to have a feeling of well-being. Both Trilo Gujadhur and Daniel Lai Fang insist on the need for a healthy lifestyle. “People often tend to put all their problems in the same dustbin. They do not eat properly, have no self- discipline and think all this will be solved with yoga. I mean, if someone is anaemic, he/she will suffer from irritation and insomnia and this could be taken as a sign of stress. But the first thing he/she should do is to change the way he/she eats,” highlights Trilo Gujadhur.

Yoga can’t be practised for a short period of time only. It has to be part of a positive lifestyle and constantly cultivated. “Many people tend to do fashionable, extraordinary activities and then stop everything suddenly.” The simple fact of breathing the way the body was meant to should help in everyday life. Breathing exercises are present in all relaxation techniques. “The body is made to take in far more air than it actually does. Human beings have forgotten how to breathe,” says Daniel Lai.

Yoga, reiki and tai chi are all techniques that help achieve well-being. “What people are trying to do is recover harmony between body and mind. When you achieve this balance, then you can enjoy life.” According to the teacher, reiki had existed in Asia for several thousand years but it has been re-discovered by Dr Mikao Usui. It is a technique which is based on a transfer of energy from the practitioner’s hands to the “patient’s” body. Traditional Chinese medicine is based on the theory that many physical or mental problems are in fact caused by a lack of energy at some point or a surplus of energy somewhere which blocks its flow around the body.

So, everyone should have the power of breathing new energy into someone to make him/her feel better and everyone has this power. Reiki is just a method, which develops this capacity to “cure” a certain number of non-pathological problems. “But you can’t heal people if you are not clean internally and externally,” warns Shiksha. The quest of Daniel Lai Fang for well-being has not only led him to practise reiki but he has also been practising and teaching tai chi for a long time. “The relation between the various activities I have done in my life is the quest for union, harmony of mind and body. I have practised several martial arts and tai chi was the logical continuation.”

Tai chi is a martial art. Its slow movements are experienced at different levels by different people. “Each person experiences tai chi in his/her own way but what everyone is looking for is a feeling of well-being.”

Even if techniques are different, people practising them have the same desire: to find a way of feeling better in their lives – professional and personal. It might be a craze – a fashionable activity that people do to be ‘in’ – but if it can help them feel better (with genuine teachers), then why not?

<B>The real meaning of “meditation”</B>

“Meditation is very different from mental escapism,” says Shiksha Gujadhur straight away. In meditation, there is no past, no future, only the “now”.” Meditation is in fact the seventh of the eight stages of yoga, also called “dhyana”. Meditation can be achieved only with patience. It is placed just before the ultimate stage of yoga practice - the Samadhi – a state of super-consciousness brought about by profound meditation in which the individual aspirant becomes one with the object of meditation. “Meditation is not an escape from the world; it is not an isolating self-enclosing activity but rather the comprehension of the world and its ways (…). The mind freeing itself from the known is meditation. Prayer goes from the known to the known; it may produce results but it is still within the field of the known – and the known is the conflict, the misery and confusion. Meditation is the total denial of everything that the mind has accumulated,” says world famous Krishnamurti in his “Second Penguin Krishnamurti Reader.”