Why Practice Yoga in Linkedin?
One more marketing post before I launch the pilot course this weekend. I promise.
Sometimes, life demands that you respond to the muse who refuses to budge a single inch. What is the whole point of solopreneurship if you cannot do crazy experiments?
Take the case of designing a course called “Yoga of LinkedIn”. Where did this itch begin?
I was introduced to Yoga when I joined a summer camp in Ramakrishna Mutt at the age of 10. During one of the summer camp sessions, there was a screening of a Bengali movie on the life of Swami Vivekananda. I was so floored by the movie that soon after the screening, I went straight to the admin office to enquire about the procedure to join the mutt as a monk.
Swami Gautamananda, who was the head of the mutt back then, gave me a bemused look that deflated the seriousness of my intent. Perhaps, to be nice to a 10-year-old, he asked me to approach this topic with my parents first, and when they were ready, I could perhaps come back again.
His smile was perhaps an intuition that I would never come back. This desire came back though during my 20s when I decided to be a meditation teacher under a popular spiritual guru. For reasons that barely made sense, even this didn't happen. Truth be told, for the first two and half decades of my life, I've run behind several gurus, and sooner than later, ran away from them, when I realized that my quest was something else.
Today, as I reflect on my Yoga journey with my mentor Raghu Ananthanarayanan along with a beautiful sangha of Yoga practitioners that we call Ritambhara, I realize how much more I've come to cherish the role of a householder in pursuing Yoga as a way of life, beyond binaries of work and life, materiality and spirituality, journey and destination.
Actually, the greatest joy of learning Yoga comes in discovering that there is no destination whatsoever. So what if I screw up my life this time? I still have several more lives to sort myself out and get things straight.
Ever since I became a part of Ritambhara Ashram, one question that started to animate me is this: In what ways, is my life’s expression shaped by my Yoga sadhana?
When I look back at my life, I see an interesting trend. For the first thirty-four years of my life, much like most 'Indo-Anglians' of my age(credits to Sajith Pai for coining such a sticky phrase), my life ran on two tracks.
One was an external "career" track. The other was an inner work/cultural development track. As was the norm of our times, in the poetic words of Rudyard Kipling, "The twain shall never meet".
Perhaps, as half-colonized Indians, the two tracks never met for a simple reason. We never had the confidence to bring our cultural selves to the places where our professional selves resided.
We could never feel comfortable wearing dhoti or kurta to client meetings (unless it was an ethnic day). And beyond sartorial markers, we could never bring the frames in which our culture understood the world onto places where our work intersected with the world outside.
Is it even possible to brng these two tracks together?
For me, the joy of designing "Yoga of LinkedIn" course stems from this question.
What happens when we bring our cultural understanding of Yoga into the way we leverage the last standing social network LinkedIn?
The more I study Yoga Sutras, it is absolutely clear that to practice Yoga is to ask a fundamental question: In doing what I am doing, what am I really doing?
And so the question that I am exploring in the course is simple: "In doing what I am doing on LinkedIn, what am I really doing?"
If you are game to join this experiment, you can register here
No more marketing posts beyond this:) Thank you for reading:)