If you think yoga pants are cool…
Check out this portrait of a yogi gangster rapper. My friend, Aadesh, and his family run the Shiva Yog center in Nepal, a spiritual center and ashram that serves as a source of learning, teaching, healing, hope, and unconditional love for the community. Aadesh has been living yoga his whole life, and it is a part of him and his art as a rapper on the rise. He says that he knows and feels yoga at its core and at his core. His rap video ‘Yogi’ is coming out soon.
So let’s hear what he has to teach us about what yoga truly means and is meant to be.
The word ‘yoga’ comes from the Sanskrit word for ‘union’. It is a union between the body, mind and spirit of the self, and it is a union between the self and the divine consciousness.
Yoga is also a meditation and a concentration… so when you are cooking you are fully focused on cooking… and when you are eating you are fully focused on eating… and when you are sleeping you are fully sleeping.
Yoga is also the art of life and death and rebirth. It helps you feel that everything is impermanent, including happiness and sadness, thus it teaches you how to be happy and sad.
And of course it is also a practice of keeping the body healthy, which allows you to keep the mind healthy… because you have to be able to sit comfortably to meditate. It brings the physical body into ease, which is the opposite of dis-ease. It helps the energy flow freely.
Aadesh says that yoga helps make every moment a masterpiece. Yoga helps him see his true possibilities, and his rap is a form of expression as yoga is. It makes him feel free. It creates a beautiful sort of search in life where you ask questions and accept that there aren’t always answers.
So there you have it folks… yoga really is cool! And taking care of yourself is cool.
I think that whether we realize it or not, this is probably the real reason yoga is so popular, because people have a deep need for this feeling and flowing of freedom.
Thank you Aadu and all the other yogis out there who are life long truth- seekers, speakers and teachers, and help us see all the possibilities!
Here we go yo
Listen to this lesson
In this rhythm, rhyme and verse
The yogi knows the union
Between you and the universe
So stretch your body and mind
Up to the sky and fly
To find the connection
In this art of expression
Make every moment a masterpiece
And you can be the medicine
And heal this dis-ease
Let the energy flow freely
Feel the infinity of possibility
In the sun salutation
And know that we are all one
#Taking care of yourself is cool