Cabinet takes yogic breather in cool comfort at the Square
Sometimes in a man’s life, when the world’s burdens get too much to bear, then it’s best to lay the load aside and take a breather with a spot of animating yoga, India’s ancient Vedic way to harmonise body, mind and soul and seek union with the ultimate reality.
Its roots lie in Hinduism’s 5000-year-old Rig Veda, one of the four sacred texts written in Sanskrit. It contains over a thousand slokas, used by yogis to develop the mind and physical fitness. The yogic way also lies at the very foundation of Buddhist meditation, prescribed by the Buddha as an indispensable discipline to realise Enlightenment.
There are over 60 different postures, called asanas, in yoga. They are designed to improve flexibility, muscle strength, spinal protection and to increase blood flow. Yoga’s ancient wisdom can be boiled down to five basic tenets, Proper exercise or Asana, Proper breathing or Pranayama, Proper relaxation or Savasana, Proper meditation and nutritious diet, Positive thinking and Meditation or Vedanta and Dhyana.
What better way for the Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, and some of his cabinet colleagues, than to lay down their burdens and unwind on Tuesday’s World Yoga Day at Independence Square – held under the auspices of the Indian High Commission -- by giving a public display of the inherent benefits found in the mystical practice of Himalayan Rishis?
The break would, indeed, have been refreshing; and just what any Indian therapist would have ordered them to do to prep themselves 48 hours before Thursday’s top-level Indian delegation arrived in Lanka to meet them: To cease brooding over why they have so dismally failed to connect with the people, why their mindsets skip the beat, botch the lines and keep eternally out of step with the people’s rhythm and blues; and strive instead to attain another more positive, albeit, elusive goal. To attempt through Yoga, to fuse their own individual consciousness with that of the Universal.
But lest their noble endeavours to keep beat with the Universal pulse on a steamy Indian summer day in June, were to be hampered by the heat, with their focus scampering off to cruise pass long queues and venture down blind alleys of broken promises, a steady stream of Himalayan breeze flowing out from intercoolers, strategically sited in advance, ensured that this elite Brahmins of state power, these ‘pampered Jades’ of Lanka, could continue entranced in their meditations in that old familiar clime of air conditioned cool.