Throughout my stay in India I spent four weeks in a rural area just outside a city called Nasik, training to become a Yoga Teacher. What I anticipated to be a relaxing retreat, actually turned out to be one of the most challenging experiences I’ve had in my life.
Unlike many of the mass marketed teacher training programs in India, the one I selected focused on resembling the lifestyle of a traditional Yogi. Ultimately this meant thirty days of bucket showers, daddy long legs, snakes, 4am wake up calls, scrubbing floors, silent days and disconnection from the world… Ashram life.
To start off, I share with you some of the most profound life lessons I learned along my Yogic journey.
Hope you enjoy!
xx
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The 20 best lessons I learned about life while living at an Ashram
1. There is more embarrassment in pretending to know something rather than just asking. Take pride in your curiousity and be intelligently informed.
2. Relish in your own introverted-ness.
3. Be at peace with your past so you can focus on the present and enjoy the future.
4. You control your obstacles; it is your decision whether they will hold you back or help you grow.
5. The answers to many of your troubles are silence, or will come to you in silent moments.
6. Have faith in yourself and the universe.
7. Smiling with warm eyes can solve a plentiful of your quarrels.
8. Spread your joys as far and wide as you can.
9. Few things in life are surprising these days; pique your imagination by constantly finding fascination in the unknown.
10. Being alone and being truly comfortable with it is much harder than people make it out to be. Be gentle to those who do it, they are fighting a much harder battle than you see.
11. Be at peace with the reality that at the end of the day something or someone may not rescue you, but rather that you will rescue yourself from your own suffering.
12. Smile more often than you cry.
13. Be connected to the people you love near and far, make time for them even if it means a short text or e-mail.
14. Respect your mind and body for what they are; love yourself.
15. Don’t be so hard on your own heart.
16. Share your knowledge, talents and resources with the world, because nothing means much these days if you aren’t sharing.
17. Save yourself from the battles of boredom by striving for a life of continous learning and curiosity.
18. Embrace life in its entirety; celebrate the small wins and big wins.
19. Honour your emotions. Once you’ve wholly experienced them, discipline yourself over and over again until you learn to control them.
20. Always, always, always choose passion over fear.
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Look out for more posts to come in the “Diaries of a Yogi” series, where I will delve into the in and outs of living life as a modern day Yogi and showcase some of my favourite photographs.
Sonal Batavia 
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Thank you very much!!!!!!!!!! I am going to have to read these lessons more than once and not all at one time. Very good insights. Thank you ever so much again! Mari
Marialla, well am I ever flattered. Thank you for your continued support and kind words, and if it reached out to you or helped you in some way then that is the highest compliment I could hope for. Stay posted for more!
[…] “Be at peace with the reality that at the end of the day something or someone may not rescue y…(sovia philosophy) […]
I loved your post girl! It was amazing to read and feel myself reliving the experience. I can’t wait for you next one I am hooked! xoxo
Rachel – wow what a lovely surprise to see this! Thank you so much for tuning in and your kind words. It is the wonderful people I met – such as yourself – along this Yogic journey that allowed me to create any of this. So it was my good luck to have gotten to meet you. Thinking of you from afar, and hope everything with you is very nice very nice 😉 xx
[…] See Diaries of Yogi — Part 1 here […]