Yoga

By Malinda Gosvig

While Indian yogis are often pictures as ascetics living a recluse lifestyle in remote corners of the Himalayas, Indian yoga master Swami Ramdev defies the mold. The 50-something yoga guru, agile and lithe as ever, seeks to give his country’s politics the same reconditioning he provides to his ever-growing number of students.

The yoga master announced in March that he plans to form a new political party, which will revolutionize the way the India is run. “What the people need is honest, brave and responsible leadership,” he said in an interview. Swami Ramdev hopes to eradicate corruption and mend the divisions of religion and caste that currently plague his country’s political system by reintroducing traditional Indian values. He intends to heal and strengthen his nation through the same means he brings health and strength to his students: through the ancient Indian wisdom found in holy Vedic texts. His formula? Clean up the body, then clean up democracy.

Though he does not intend to run for office himself, the yoga master/guru plans to have candidates run for all of India’s 543 parliamentary seats in the 2014 general election, reports the New York Times.

Regardless of how his political endeavors go, Swami Ramdev’s yoga teachings have met with extraordinary success in India. While not well known in the West, Swami Ramdev is legendary in India, not just for his yoga teachings, but for his humanitarian efforts. In addition to a hospital, an Ayurvedic medical school, and a research institution, Swami Ramdev oversees an agricultural and processing operation that produces products ranging from shampoo to herbal supplements. He has led yoga classes in the U.S. (where he intends to open a yoga and health center), Japan, and Nepal and his organization recently acquired a small island of the coast of Scotland. 

Six years ago, Anita Lopez graced the KUSA-9News anchor desk to deliver the week’s top headlines. However, when two devastating injuries left her with chronic back pain that rendered her unable to sit in a chair, Anita found herself pulled out of the news world and faced with dramatic story of her own: a downward-spiraling painkiller addiction.

According to The Denver Post, after trying traditional physical therapies — traction, massage, strength training — without finding relief for her chronic back pain, Lopez turned to the only pain relief she could find: the medicine cabinet.

It wasn’t until CNN covered Rush Limbaugh’s prescription-drug-abuse story that Lopez realized she had a problem. 

"I immediately went to the medicine cabinet and realized I was taking more painkillers than Rush did," Lopez explains to The Denver Post.

The wake-up call motivated Lopez to battle her addiction, turning away from the pills and heading for a healthy, balanced alternative instead, using yoga as therapy for back pain. She had practiced yoga before, but had gotten away from it. Now, with the help of regular yoga classes, Lopez not only overcame her drug addiction, but also restored her body into a healthy, naturally pain-free state. By taking two yoga classes six to seven days a week, Lopez was able to grow out of the downward spiral she had been stuck in and triumph over both pills and pain.

Like so many people before her, the experience of how effectively yoga helped her back pain prompted Lopez to take up a new career path: teaching yoga. Under the business name Anita Yoga, she now offers Yoga at Work classes to businesses, teaching courses in 12-week sessions covered by the company, employee, or a combination of both.

According to Lopez, large corporations like Nike, Forbes, Apple and other Fortune 500 companies have been providing onsite yoga for years, with fruitful benefits to the individual participants and company as a whole.