Bbillboards, billboards and a host of other promotional and marketing tools have become an integral part of the country’s newly developed urban areas. Health and fitness frenzied citizens, especially young men and women impressed by these marketing campaigns, do not hesitate to pay hefty sums to burn extra fat and stay fit, smart and active.
What excited me the most about these fitness centers were the yoga classes offered by the master trainers. My curiosity to explore the value of these specialized courses took me beyond the boundaries of research, which ended with a meeting with a real yoga master, Shamshad Haider, who learned yoga from the ancient yogis of Tibet, Nepal and India.
Meeting Shamshad was a wonderful experience, his calm and collected personality with a tucked ponytail reflected his extensive knowledge of yoga. The morning tranquility of Ayub Rawalpindi National Park added more colors to the yoga exercises organized by Shamshad and his wife Shumila at Baradari. Shamshad, who hails from a small town near Mandi Bahaudin, has been practicing yoga since 1991. Shamshad’s introduction to yoga was accidental when he developed abdominal pain in Saudi Arabia and doctors advised him to undergo surgery. It was through meditation and controlling his concentration that he was able to overcome his discomfort without surgery.
Shamshad said that it took him sixteen long years to master the art of yoga, which he mainly learned from his Mist teacher, Ehsan Govinka, who lived a healthy life and passed away at the age of 95 in 2013. He became very sentimental when asked about the origin of this wonderful art. Shamshad said there is a serious misunderstanding between yoga and Hinduism. The fact is that yoga was developed around 3000 years ago by a person named Maha Rashi Patangali who hailed from Multan. Patangali discovered the relationship between body, mind and spirit and documented the traditional postures or Ahsans of yoga in book form.
Shamshad, while relating yoga to sports, said that yoga can improve the sporting ability of athletes at many levels. In our sports system, emphasis is placed on physicality and skills, while the mental fitness of athletes is ignored, the yogi said. It is thanks to yoga that athletes can achieve a state of supreme fitness and flexibility. Yoga also improves tolerance and concentration under pressure. Shamshad said that great sporting achievements can only be achieved through a relaxed mind and high energy level, of which yoga exercises are the key.
While discussing the health benefits of yoga, Shamshad said with great confidence that such interventions can reduce the number of hospitalized patients by 50%. He said the Indian government supports yoga on a large scale.
Yoga is now taught in schools and colleges in several cities and towns thanks to a movement led by Ram Dave, an internationally renowned yogi.
According to Shoib Hamid, himself a yoga teacher and student of Shamshad, there are 84,000 poses in yoga and sixty different ways of breathing and meditating. Shamshad, however, has divided the yoga exercises into three main parts for the convenience of the students.
The first part of yoga is meditation or dhayan. Dhayan teaches us to focus on our current state. Human beings, by nature, tend to live in the past or the future. This state of mind is not very good for our physical or psychological health because we can neither repair our past nor project ourselves into the future. This tendency to live in the past or the future adds unnecessary pressure on the athlete. Players can easily stop this unnecessary thought process that triggers anxiety through meditation and improve their performance in the current state.
The second most important part of yoga is breathing or Pran. Breathing in yoga is not the ordinary breathing of oxygen, but it is the energy that moves life. It teaches you how to breathe correctly and deeply to nourish all the organs of the body. Breath control in yoga is also called Anatan. While linking breath control to spiritualism, Shamshad vilified the fact that recitation of Allah ho with breath work is even very common and extremely effective among non-Muslims in many yoga centers across the world.
Shumaila, Shamshad’s wife, while sharing her experience on controlling breathing, told me that at one time she herself was asthmatic and her respiratory system had become very weak. The problem got so bad that she was hospitalized and doctors gave her a multitude of medications and inhalers that she tried for several months without significant improvement.
The third part of yoga is the physical posture or Ahsan as it is called in yoga terminology. In yoga, the human body is considered as a temple called Shamshad. Yoga exercises aim to transform the bodily being into an energetic being. These exercises not only make your body flexible and supple but also release tension and prepare us to face life’s challenges or before any crucial match.
Yoga is actually a way of life and an art of exploring the hidden qualities of the athlete within the body, mind and spirit.
The sportsman can easily learn Rag Yog, Pranyam Yog and Kundilini Yog to master the art of yoga and easily access the Salutogenesis international health model which talks about the feeling of coherence, making people better equipped to face the daunting challenges of life and sport.
The World Health Organization, the American College of Sport Medicine and the American Heart Association recommend 30 minutes of moderate aerobic exercise five days a week or 20 minutes of intense aerobic exercise three days a week and supplement it with muscular strength and endurance work at least once or twice a week.
Shamshad is of the opinion that if athletes and fitness enthusiasts adopt yoga as a part of their lifestyle, it will not only help them achieve great physical fitness, but it will also keep their body flexible with cutting-edge breathing control and concentration to outperform their opponents.
I had the opportunity to interact with many students who came to take yoga classes. Mr Tufail, a 55-year-old dental surgeon, said yoga had renewed his life. Fasih Bokhari came out of a depressive phase of his life thanks to yoga and Mohammad Rafi, aged fifty-one, looks no more than thirty and attributes his youth to yoga.
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