Changing from Within

As I’m sitting inside a tiny Paris apartment turned yoga studio,

I realize how at peace I am with myself since I began practicing yoga — and how in sync everyone in this room seems to be in their own yoga practice.

It’s 8:00 pm, the apartment is small and dimly lit. Everyone is closing their eyes and rejoicing in the meditative sounds playing in the background. No one can interrupt the sensations of peace and gratefulness overcoming my body. I feel good energy, but mostly from the instructor, Lily Nanda, who guides us through a beautiful “Shavasana.” She has made us forget the Covid-19 crisis and the slow process of re-confinement the city is going through at the moment.

“Slow and low is the tempo,” she says while we are in deep meditation. Nanda is a young blond French woman. Her bronzed skin and white smile are like. With a very original bindi and amazing jewelry on her hands and toes, her spectacular vibe resonates in the entire room.

When I come out of a beautiful trance, I realize there is still a pandemic going on out there, but I live it differently. While some people had a terrible time in lockdown, I had the best three months of my life.

The pandemic shook most of our lives; our health, mentality, economy, social life, and many aspects we might not know yet, altered our plans. It was not only the fact of a new unknown, uncontrollable disease spreading around the world, infecting people at random; it was also de fact that we had to go into lockdown. Our social lives, academic lives, work experiences, and everything as we knew them changed. We have had to work from home, spend time alone or 24/7 with our families, adapt to a new reality and continuous flow of negative news. All these challenged our mental health, created anxiety, and for some, depression. Having in mind the importance of my mental health, I decided to pick up yoga. And like me, many people did so too; and it made my confinement 99% better. Why? You may ask, well, it gave me a routine, a center, and helped me calm my life and anxiety.

Yoga is one of the most ancient meditation practices, has recently become popular with the pandemic crisis. There was an industry-wide shutdown of yoga studios during the pandemic, so yogis had to look for it elsewhere. YouTube, apps, and Instagram lives became recurrent. The amount of yoga practitioners has increased during Covid, some do it to find wellness, and others to reinforce their practices. Whichever of these two, yoga is shown to provide a broad-spectrum immune body to help combat viruses and be at peace with your own body. According to the United Nations, yoga is good to deal with lockdown uncertainty and isolation, impacting positively mental and physical health. “A lot of people took to their mats during lockdown to calm their minds and lift their spirits. Yoga brings a connection and good vibes, whether in a studio or through a computer screen. For some, an online class was an easier first step on the yoga path than entering a real studio,” told Greet de Ryck, a Belgian yoga teacher in France, to the UN.

Yoga helps a better body image, mental health, becoming a mindful eater, and reduces cardiovascular risk; it soothes tension and anxiety. According to Harvard Health Medical School: “(..) practicing yoga improved lipid profiles in healthy patients as well as patients with known coronary artery disease”. It’s as good as medicine. With yoga, once you start practicing, you feel so good, you don’t want to stop, all the areas in your life begin to align. If this is not enough to convince you, you should know that 300 million people worldwide practice yoga, and 54% of practitioners assure that yoga helps them release tension. For 94% of practitioners, yoga is essential for their wellbeing, and they do it for wellness-related reasons. You don’t need to practice 90 minutes of yoga every day; according to compare camp, only 15 minutes can help change the brain chemistry and improve your mood.

“A yogic lifestyle helps to calm our minds because it triggers our parasympathetic nervous system through various “asanas and pranayama — breath control in yoga — which “helps to reduce tension in muscles and joints,” says Ankit Tiwari to Analou agency, he is a doctor and a yoga expert.

In the upscale 7th arrondissement of Paris, YUJ is a yoga studio on a discreet street in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. There are five YUJ studios in the city. The studio in the 7th arrondissement has seen an increase in new students after confinement. It started with new subscribers to their online yoga classes, and most of them are now coming to in-person sessions. Some are afraid to go to a studio, however, and so keep following the online courses. Both agree that yoga is right for them and has helped set aside a moment for their wellbeing during this time of uncertainty. One YUJ studio member, Christine, agrees with this, adding that yoga was essential for her; since she suffers from back problems and couldn’t visit the doctor every day, yoga helped her feel better and be more in touch with her body. Today she comes from outside of Paris every day to go to in-person classes at YUJ.

When I started doing yoga seven months ago, I never thought I would end up levitating in a small “underground” yoga studio in the 10th arrondissement. My practice began to do a different activity and move my body during confinement; I didn’t know it would change my life so miraculously. I eventually started practicing six times a week, and some days even twice. It became a way of feeling better, a space of meditation amidst the crisis going on in the world. By this, I don’t mean that I stopped caring or turned a blind eye. I just internalized and looked inside.

Lily Nanda practices every day, and she has been practicing yoga for four years and teaching for two. After the first class, I had with Lily before most of the yoga studios closed again due to Covid, I fell in love with her practice, the way she guided the class, and transmitted love to her body and students. I realized that yoga is much more than practicing a workout every day, but a way to pamper the soul.

I kept going to a few of her classes until they closed the studios. I decided not to give up, so I looked for her to talk about this idea of yoga and mindfulness. She invited me to join her class at the 10th arrondissement apartment studio, where I spoke to her about my ideas. I wanted her expert opinion on whether yoga was good for mindfulness, especially during confinement.

“These practices are incredible tools for a better management of stress and life’s hazards because they allow you to focus on the concrete, on the essential, breathing or passing sensations, for example,” — Nanda.

Lily could do exactly this every day of her first month of confinement since she was “stuck” in India until April, surprisingly so, the same place where she certified as a yoga instructor. So, it was an exceptional time for her when she returned to Paris and started giving yoga online zoom classes, a whole new world. “And the rules have changed, face-to-face classes have become much rarer. The online world has taken precedence over the rest, yes.”

Yoga expert and instructor Tamara Kuznetcova agrees with this point. The Russian native has been practicing yoga for ten years, and she does it six times a week. She is an instructor at YUJ studio, where I met her. After taking her very dynamic and flowy class, I sat down and talked to her. I asked her how the transition from “in-person” yoga classes to online was for her; since this was a big part of confinement. She said that even though many students had a challenging time with technology, with classes migrating to Zoom during confinement, she also saw a growth in the number of people that watched her classes.

“I started to do lives from home; it was amazing, like a connection between the people,” she says. “On Instagram TV, you don’t see them; they write and give you the positive energy, just this, they fulfill you for the whole day.”

I agree with Kuznetcova; this is what yoga is all about; even though it can be challenging, people discover a new way of feeling better, even in an enclosed space.

To explain better why yoga is essential, especially during this time, Kuznetcova quoted the famous yoga teacher, Angarak, who created a full-direction yoga: “Why people start to do yoga is not always why they go on doing it.”

You might think that yoga is right for your physical health, but it’s much more than that. This is why the more I practiced yoga during the lockdown, the more things I discovered and the better I felt. According to Kuznetcova, “yoga affects all the directions of your life; you feel you need to rest, eat, stay away from someone.”

Yoga is one of the most ancient practices, and it has recently become more popular. Many people took it up to feel better during Covid, and others just reinforced their practices. During this second confinement, it can only be expected to see a significant amount of people returning to yoga as a way of internalizing and reconnecting with themselves. When you can’t be out, yoga can bring you in.