Sushila Sampat is 34, self-employed, and a mother of two. She tries hard to balance her time between work and family, a task that leaves her with little or no time to herself. By the end of the week, complete exhaustion sets in, and all Sushila wants to do is sit in front of her computer.
Yes, you read that right -- sit in front of her computer. What she does is turn to yoga, via the Internet.
What most of us know is that Yoga is about self-diagnosis, healing, and prevention. What we also know is that it has been practiced by millions over thousands of years. What we don’t know, however, is that it is fast becoming a source of relaxation and exercise for thousands trying to deal with high levels of stress at work.
A large number of websites are constantly cropping up, all offering ways and means to enlightenment with the click of a few icons. There’s Saffron Soul for example, which is devoted to alternative healing therapies like yoga, ayurveda and panchakarma. It also gives visitors chats with experts and has a ‘healing store.’
Yoga Anand Ashram has step-by-step explanations of different yoga postures, along with essays on meditation, a newsletter called Moksha and an in-depth look at the philosophy behind yoga. Yet another site, Yes2Yoga, holds interactive classes, chats, bulletin boards, and also provides specialised packages for corporate customers.
According to a New York-based research firm, 26 percent of people logging on to the Internet for health-related advice wind up at fitness sites. The question is, why?
Answers may lie in an increasing familiarity with the medium, the current stress that comes with most IT-related jobs today, or even something as mundane as a lack of facilities for relaxation, like massages. Given these reasons, it is hardly surprising that exercising and relaxing online is looked at as an easy, cheap, and convenient ticket to some much needed respite.
While some sites concentrate solely on providing masses of information, others add interactive capabilities, making for a richer experience for users. Timages, for example, holds classes in Macromedia Shockwave format, enabling users to choose any pose they like and download them. BeyondBody offers audio files that can be downloaded for help with meditation techniques, and visitors at Yogaclass can improve their stretching, relaxation, and breathing by downloading RealAudio lessons. Nutricise also uses video clips that it calls ‘FitClips’ to demonstrate a number of exercises and techniques.
According to experts, yoga produces profound states of well-being because it frees us from the confining postures we assume regularly -- like wearing restrictive clothing, sitting in chairs, and using tight shoes -- and eases our spinal columns to suddenly make life, and all things around us, seem so much better.
A contemporary trend emerging in this field focuses specifically on computer users, by posting exercises related to joints and muscles that may be overworked while using a computer. iVillage.com has a yoga section that delves deep into postures for the neck, shoulders, wrists and hands, apart from self-massage techniques.
AllHealth has an interesting article titled ‘Are you Being Damaged at Work?’, a quick run-through of what your work place and working style should, ideally, be like.
Given its many benefits, it is hardly surprising that a number of doctors and chiropractors have now begun prescribing yoga for their patients. Research proves that yoga helps manage or control everything from asthma and anxiety, to arthritis, blood pressure, back pain, chronic fatigue, diabetes, carpal tunnel syndrome, heart diseases, epilepsy, stress, depression, etc.
A lot of basic information for novices can be had at Yogasite, which also comes with additional features like ‘Yoga Poems’, a Yoga Events Calendar, and yoga for kids, PMS, and chronic pain. Officeworkout is all about, well, workouts at the office. The site acts as a personal training service and uses a series of online workout and training videos in RealVideo -- all completely customisable to suit individual requirements.
One last stop for beginners and old hands alike is Yogabasics, which comes with loads of lessons on meditation and breathing. It also functions as an effective online guide to hatha yoga, with a text and visual guide to its asanas or postures. There’s also a complete yoga resource guide, including yoga supplies, videos, audio CDs, books, and additional links.
For Sushila Sampat, peace was never as easy to come by. Or, come to think of it, half as cheap.
Tell us what you think of this article
