If someone had told me that I would sit
through a series of lectures without drifting off into a daydream every ten
minutes, I would have replied in the affirmative with sarcasm dripping from my
tone. But this was different, these lectures were about something that we are
most familiar with and yet something that we think about the least – ourselves.
The “Just you” workshop did justice to its name indeed. We reached the venue on
the early morning of July 2nd, allowing us sufficient time to take
in the rustic beauty of the surroundings with banyan and mango trees forming a
roof over our heads, welcomed by the chirping of birds (accompanied by some
not-so-welcoming yet harmless reptiles, read: snakes). We were to spend the next couple of days
listening to thought-provoking lectures, intermittent with yoga sessions.
Personally, this workshop could not have
happened at a better time for me. What I understood to be the essence of the
workshop and the lectures was that, yoga, apart from working on your physical
inflexibility, also removes your mental and emotional rigidities. However, the
brilliant experience that we had in those couple of days is far from the
mundane account of it, as my lack of literary expression puts it. At the very
mention of yoga, most people my age would regard it with ridicule and dismiss
it as being didactic. This camp was far from being preachy being preachy, on
the contrary, it took a very pragmatic approach to expound the wonders that
yoga could work on both our body and mind. The message
was simple: you can mould your body and mind the way you want them to be, at
any point in life. All you need to do is to want to change.
Overall, it was a remarkable experience. I
do not claim to have developed a profound understanding about myself in those
couple of days, however, I have definitely realised why I need to start
thinking about it and in what ways it would help me. I would like to thank the
teachers of SYC for the time and effort that they have invested in developing a
truly motivating and yet fun-filled camp. It would a pleasure and a great
learning experience if we were to have such camps more frequently.