Why We Must Incorporate Yoga and Breathing Into Our Lives

We spent a beautifully balmy afternoon chatting with Akash Gadamsetty, faculty of the Yoga and Breathing course at Lilanoor. He graciously offered us a glimpse into his intimate journey with yoga and breathing. For the course at Lilanoor, he has curated and handpicked small moments from this life-altering journey, to make it more accessible and tangible for us to learn from. This interview however goes far beyond the ambit of the course, and delves into how yoga can transform one’s spiritual, bodily, emotional and organisational self and what it truly means to be joyous.

Yoga has been an introspective journey, which I chanced upon when I had gone through a phase in life and was trying to get into a certain state of mind. Throughout childhood, my father had been pushing me into meditation but I was sceptical; my constant concern was – “How is just sitting down going to help with anything?”. When I actually found yoga later in life, I realised that the things I wanted to fix were not outside but inside me. Yoga seemed to be the perfect answer. Initially for me, it was only a mental process, not a physical asana oriented activity. I learnt with time that yoga was about how our thought process works and how we identify with each other. 2017 was the first time I got initiated into the practice of yoga and I went into a program. After completing the program I slowly began delving into it full time. There was even a time when I quit my job and moved to a yogashram in Coimbatore for about 7 months. That’s when I found how yoga might work in someone’s life.

So just to provide some context – in the midst of this immersive yoga experience, I hadn’t practised music at all in the ashram. But when I came back, my voice was two times larger than it used to be! I didn’t know how it had happened! My teacher was so surprised and asked me if I practised a lot but I hadn’t! I couldn’t answer how my voice had grown . Later on, when we started discovering and practising breathing techniques in singing, I found that a lot of them were somehow linked to all the yoga I had done because of their common focus on opening up the back, putting flexibility in the body etc.

In fact, singing without stress is about building both the necessary strength and flexibility at the same time. If you tighten any muscle in the system, the voice is affected. Yoga is the same – you learn to sit in postures and you’re intensely still. Usually we associate intensity with an immense amount of action but intensity can be everywhere – even in silence and stillness.

I learnt through physical yoga that in order to reach that stage of complete stillness with intensity, you need to work your body a lot. The same is what happened with me, in singing – you keep on training your lower back to stretch, your ribcage to open up – all of which requires strength, which is especially needed in opera. So the significant overlap in both is that if you put in a certain amount of pre-work, you reach a point of effortlessness.

I found that these parallels between the two could help my singing. I started integrating them – using surya kriya and yoga asanas with the breathing exercises for the voice – and there were so many similarities in a lot of exercises.

At a given point I was doing 6 hours of hata yoga everyday – which included kriya, yoga and also work. The ashram I was in, has been built carefully – there are certain energy spaces. They don’t feel how normal spaces feel – the moment you step in, it’s a transformative experience. It’s like getting into a room that you have built for yourself – in terms of your personality and your presence. You immerse yourself into it fully.

This module does not contain just yoga – it has a lot of elements of vocal perspective breathing in it – for you to experience breathing in its fullest. So when you go to a voice lesson, you’re halfway ready with the breathing techniques already and then your teacher can fine tune it.

So for the first 3 months I walk you through hand-picked exercises – they’re more physical, involving asanas – and then gradually it transitions into meditative experiences. On starting most things, usually people ask – What is the use of it? How can it be used? To gain that initial sense of satisfaction and an answer to that question, I believe it’s important to first get to the utility of something and then look beyond it. So in this module too, we first give students small practices whose usefulness is more immediately visible and then slowly those exercises itself will be used to get into a state of mind to tap into other depths as a person.

This module eventually helps get to a better general level of productivity in life. It makes way for a more joyous way of living – not necessarily in the sense of “Oh I’m so happy all the time” but perhaps more in terms of the 20-30 minutes of practice being therapeutic and bringing about the thought that “this is one thing that helps me go on”. In these 30 mins you’ll naturally come to a place of relaxation. So I’m definitely not offering solutions to life but a way to make one feel a bit better.

I don’t see the both of them as separate things. If the question is about how much arms and legs will you move, I can tell you that the movement itself won’t be as much as the breath work. And even in movement activities where there are elements of flexibility etc, the focus is on the breath. Because every single movement of the body is based on how we breathe. So, in terms of exercises, I’d say around 30% is physical body exercises.

Right now the module I have is for 14+ years. For children, I feel, there is less of a need to teach meditation per se. We can teach them breathing techniques for focus etc, but specific yogic practices are not needed for a young age.

Created through https://crosswordlabs.com

6. An essential involuntary/voluntary action in the body. [9]

7. The third energy junction from bottom to top along the spinal cord. [10]

9. Author of the Yoga Sutras. [9]

10. The fifth element; Also the name of our faculty member of Yoga & Breathing. [5]

11. Muscle in the body that helps you breathe. [9]

12. An internal action for transforming energies. [5] 13. An ancient school of thought originating in Mount Kailash, Tibet, that focuses on building up the human system up to its fullest potential. [4]