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A plethora of billboards, hoardings and other promotional and marketing tools have become part and parcel of newly developed urban areas in the country. Health and fitness crazed citizens, especially young men and women are influenced by these marketing campaigns and do not hesitate to pay huge fees 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 master trainers. My curiosity to find out the value of these special classes led me to the limits of research, which ended up with Shamshad Haider, a real yoga master who has learned yoga from ancient yogis in Tibet, Nepal and India.
Meeting Shamshad was an amazing experience, his cool and calm personality with a slicked back ponytail was a reflection of his in-depth knowledge of yoga. The early morning tranquility in Ayub National Park Rawalpindi added more colors to the yoga exercise organized by Shamshad and his wife Shamila at Baradari. Shamshad, who hails from a small town near Mandi Bahadin, 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 focus control that he was able to overcome his pain without surgery.
Shamshad said it took him sixteen years to master the art of yoga, which he learned mostly from his Broome teacher Ehsan Govanka, who lived a healthy life and died in 2013 at the age of 95. When asked about the origin of this amazing art, he became very emotional. Shamshad said that it is a serious misconception to associate yoga with Hinduism. The fact is that yoga was developed about 3000 years ago by a man named Maharashi Patangali, who hails from Multan. Patangali explored the relationship between body, mind and spirit and documented the traditional yoga postures or ahsan in book form.
Relating yoga to sports, Shamshad said that yoga can enhance sportsmanship in many layers. Yogi said that our sports system focuses on physicality and skill while neglecting the mental fitness of the players. Sportspersons can achieve a state of high fitness and flexibility only through yoga. Yoga also improves stress tolerance and concentration. Shamshad said that great achievements in sports can only be achieved through relaxed minds and high energy levels of which yoga practice is the key.
Discussing the health benefits of yoga, Shamshad confidently said that such an intervention could reduce the patient load from hospitals by 50%. He said that the Indian government is supporting yoga on a grand scale.
Yoga is now being taught in schools and colleges in many cities and villages through a movement led by Ramdev, a yogi of international repute.
According to Shaib Hameed, himself a yoga teacher and student of Shamshad, yoga has 84,000 poses and sixty different methods of breathing and meditation. Shamshad, however, has divided the yoga practices into three main parts for the ease of students.
The first part of yoga is meditation or meditation. Dhyana teaches us to pay attention to our present state. By nature, man lives in the past or the future. This state of mind is not very good for our physical or psychological health because we can rehash our past or jump into the future. This tendency to live in the past or the future adds unnecessary pressure on the sportsperson. Athletes can easily stop the unnecessary thought process that triggers anxiety through meditation and improve their performance in the present state.
The second most important part of yoga is breathing or prana. Breathing in yoga is not a mere breath of oxygen, but the energy that animates 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 Anaton. Relating breath control to spirituality, Shamshad said that reciting Allah Ho along with breath work is also very common and highly effective with non-Muslims in many yoga centers around the world.
Shamshad’s wife Shamshad’s wife, sharing her experience on breath control, tells me that at one stage she herself was an asthmatic and her respiratory system had become very weak. The problem worsened to such an extent that he was hospitalized and doctors gave him a barrage of drugs and inhalers that he tried for several months with no improvement.
The third part of yoga is physical posture or ahsan as they call it in yoga terms. Shamshad said that in yoga the human body is considered as a temple. Yoga exercises are meant to transform the body into an energy entity. These exercises not only make your body flexible and supple but also release tension and prepare us to face challenges in life or before an important 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.
A sportsperson can easily learn Raga Yoga, Pranam Yoga and Kundalini Yoga to master the art of yoga and easily reach the International Salvogenesis Model of Health which talks about a sense of harmony, making people better equipped to face the tough challenges of life and sports.
The World Health Organization, the American College of Sports Medicine and the American Heart Association recommend 20 minutes of vigorous aerobic exercise five days a week, 30 minutes of moderate aerobic exercise three days a week, and supplementing with muscle strength and endurance work at least once or twice a week.
Shamshad is of the opinion that if athletes and general fitness freaks adopt yoga as part of their lifestyle, it will not only help them get in great shape but also keep their bodies flexible with a significant edge in breathing and focus control to outshine their opponents.
I had the opportunity to interact with a number of students who came to attend yoga classes. Mr Tufel, a practicing dental surgeon aged 55, says yoga has renewed his life. Fasia Bokhari has come out of a depressed phase of her life through yoga and Muhammad Rafi, who looks no more than thirty at the age of fifty and does not attribute his youth to yoga.
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