SHAS­TRI BOODAN

Sev­en­ty-one na­tion­als re­ceived their cer­tifi­cate to prac­tise Yo­ga Pranayam at Lev­el 1 as an as­sis­tant teacher. The cer­ti­fi­ca­tion came af­ter an in­ten­sive 25-hour work­shop held from Ju­ly 1–3 at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go's (UTT) Point Lisas cam­pus.The train­ing was con­duct­ed by the In­dia Alum­ni As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the UTT and the Patan­jali Yo­g­peeth (USA) Trust.Par­tic­i­pants start­ed each day with two hours of non-stop yo­ga ex­er­cis­es that in­clud­ed pos­es, or asanas, and breath­ing ex­er­cis­es, or pranaya­ma un­der the di­rec­tions of tu­tors Dr Dilip Sarkar, a re­tired car­diac sur­geon, and en­gi­neer Shekar Agraw­al, both from the US.Par­tic­i­pants were al­so briefed on aryuvedic med­i­cine, acu­pres­sure and bal­anc­ing the en­er­gy points or chakras.

The duo stressed the im­por­tance of prana­maya, and Sarkar tout­ed it as the cure for sev­er­al ma­jor lifestyle dis­eases such as high blood pres­sure, high cho­les­terol and di­a­betes. He said with dai­ly prac­tices of the pranaya­ma and yo­ga pos­es, most of these prob­lems would grad­u­al­ly de­crease in in­ten­si­ty or com­plete­ly go away, since yo­ga seeks to fix the body sys­tem and not the symp­toms, when com­pared to the treat­ment style of west­ern med­i­cine.How­ev­er, he stressed that one has to be con­sis­tent with pranaya­ma and be com­mit­ted to mak­ing lifestyle changes that in­clud­ed a change of di­et.

At the grad­u­a­tion, Sat Balka­rans­ingh, pres­i­dent of the In­dia Alum­ni As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T (IAATT), said the IAATT would be set­ting up class­es across T&T with the help of the new grad­u­ates.Balka­rans­ingh said it was the de­sire of the IAATT to see that par­tic­i­pants in the course go in­to their com­mu­ni­ty and con­duct free ses­sions."To heal this na­tion we must first be­gin with heal­ing our­selves," he ad­mon­ished.Balka­rans­ingh said par­tic­i­pants had in­di­cat­ed an in­ter­est­ed in par­tic­i­pat­ing in lev­els two and three of the pro­gramme, adding that the train­ing would al­so be of­fered in To­ba­go.Dance tu­tor Eu­gene Joseph, who al­so par­tic­i­pat­ed in the pro­gramme, said he was im­pressed and praised the IAATT for the pro­gramme.