People with mental illnesses often find respite in one thing or another. For me, it was yoga.

This is the unlikely story of how that came to be.

To take you back a couple of decades, my mother died on December 16, 1996, after embattling multiple sclerosis for years. She was only 39. Her death left me scarred and unable to fend for myself. At the behest of my maternal grandparents, I enrolled in a certificate course in teaching yoga at the Vivekananda Kendra bordering a tiny village on the outskirts of Bengaluru, in 1998. It was expected that the discipline at the Ashram, Prasathi Kutteeram, would help me overcome my depression. 

To put this in perspective, this story begins even before ’96. When I was only 14 (I was born in 1977), I started spending many nights without sleep. It was a while before I realized they had a term for it: insomnia. As the years progressed, I began waking up in my bed with my heart pounding erratically in my ears. The experts had another term for this: palpitation. 

At 17, I was diagnosed by the best psychiatrist in my hometown of Nagercoil, Tamil Nadu, as having “clinical depression.” I was given lithium and had to undergo regular blood check-ups to monitor its level in my blood. 

But back to 1998. A few months after my mother’s death, my grandparents suggested I go to the Ashram to practice yoga. I am not really a practicing Hindu (I don’t go to the temple every Friday) and was skeptical about being sequestered in the Ashram. I had to be practically parcelled to Bengaluru. My aunt ensured that I was deposited there safely.

I was lonely those first few days. The course had not yet begun, and I was admitted to the healthcare hub of the Ashram. A promise was made to my grandparents that if I finished the certificate course, I would walk out completely ‘cured.’

The routine was grueling. Bengaluru is much colder than Nagercoil, and getting up at 4.30 am for meditation sessions was especially hard on me. As expected, I began bunking the first and so-called best session of the morning and started to dodge the coordinator, who would dutifully wake me up every day. Dodging was not new to me. By then, I had already accumulated a lifetime of bunking my classes at school and college. 

I had another huge problem to face. I was smoking about five cigarettes a day and had to sneak out and walk 3 km to refuel my stock. If they caught me smoking, they would confiscate my pack.

That first week at the Ashram, I went for several sessions with a counselor. He heard me out, which was a relief, but nothing he said sunk in or struck a chord. They took away my medication and would only give it if I demanded it. 

During meditation, I had to focus on a large symbol of the Sanskrit letter Om. The Ashram went to extreme lengths to call this practice secular, but I always considered it religious. 

The morning’s ordeals included a daily class explaining particular facets of the Bhagavad Gita. The man who ran the Ashram – we called him Guruji – was a gifted teacher who kept me hooked on the sacred text right from the first day. I started visiting the bookshop on the premises to read more about the Gita. I was also a regular at the library on the premises. I remember reading ‘The English Teacher’ this way.

I took an immediate liking to the simple, vegetarian food provided at the Ashram. Breakfast was usually idly or dosa. Lunch was brilliant: We got plenty of dal (which I love) with white rice and two exquisitely made subjis. My favorite day of the week was when they cooked aloo. Dinner was more North Indian style: Chappati and subji. And, to boot, they never ran out of curd. 

The campus was huge – easily a hundred acres or more. After meditation and Gita classes, came asanas and pranayama. I hated both, despite being repeatedly told that they were healing in nature. Kriya was done, if I remember rightly, every Thursday morning. It involved putting a thin rubber tube up your nostril and bringing it out of your mouth. I found this impossible to do. Regulars at the Ashram did it like clockwork. “You don’t get it right the first time,” I was told. 

I was issued the standard attire: a pair of dark blue yoga pants and a white T-shirt. I was asked to buy a yoga mat, but I never did, thinking of it as a long-term investment. And I could never get used to the idea of washing my own clothes. Everybody in the Ashram washed their own clothes, making me rue my own sheltered existence.

After lunch, we were asked to try Shavasana – lying down on a mat with our arms and legs outstretched. This was meant to be relaxing, but we were warned not to doze off. However, I promptly did. The next class was cyclic meditation, and I would regularly miss this class. 

Now, there is an accurate science to yoga. Patanjali wrote the code centuries ago. But to my mind, suspicion about all of it loomed large, and I often thought the whole of it was bunkum. 

I began doing the asanas regularly. Combined with the strenuous morning exercises, the workout had an effect on me. I was only 21 years old, so I was not overweight. But the exercise reduced my weight slowly. From hating pranayama, I began doing it after much persuasion by my teachers at the ashram. I began sleeping less and following the routine more. I woke up for meditation; I did Trataka, an eye exercise, before sleeping at night. My mid-afternoon slumbers became a thing of the past. I also slowly became accomplished at kriya.

Om meditation was, perhaps, the toughest part of the program. Getting up at 4.30 am to do it was also proving to be extremely difficult. I usually sleep late and wake up late. Now I had to change my ways. 

The best part of the day was a session called ‘Tuning with nature.’ At one corner of the campus stood a two-floor tall tower from which you could see the setting sun. I used to go there and smoke. I was well hidden from other inmates and authorities. 

Another favorite session was Professor Swaminathan’s class on Swami Vivekananda. He delivered this talk with the help of PowerPoint slides and rare photographs of Swamiji. Prof Swaminathan was an IIT-Chennai alumnus and was well-versed in the life of Swamiji. I was in raptures in his class. Up until 1998, I had always thought I needed a spiritual guru in my life. After my time at the Ashram, I nominated Swami Vivekananda for that spot. 

I ended up staying at the campus for three months. Even after my certificate course was over, I stayed for a few days extra. I had quit smoking by the time the one-month-long certificate course ended. This, of course, came as a big relief for me. 

Yoga is known to help people with depression, just like most forms of exercise. But what is different is yoga goes deeper than the surface level. Asanas, pranayama, kriya and kabalapati all are deeply curative processes. Eventually, I liked participating in these sessions so much that I could not be kept away. 

The idea when my family deposited me at the Ashram was that I would stay for a month and undergo the certificate course. I stayed back for many days, even after procuring the degree. By then, I had fallen in love with the Ashram. Even after my grandparents came to India from the US and explicitly asked me to return home, I refused to return. 

My teachers always told me yoga is the calming of the mind. That was so true in my case. I acquired a demeanour that stays with me to this day.

There have been hundreds of occasions on which I have been grateful for the time I spent at the Ashram. One of the course requirements was to submit a thesis. As my father was at the time alcohol dependent, I wrote a thesis on ‘Alcoholism and Yoga’. When I passed, I did so, I felt, with an ‘A’ grade, thanks to my work on the thesis.

When I returned home, I had come off medication and had not taken it for several weeks. I had lost considerable weight and was actually slightly under the normal mark. Much to the delight of my grandmother, I had totally quit smoking (even though I smoked one at Majestic in Bengaluru, for old times’ sake). After I finished, I felt much better. My overall health was at a peak, thanks to the healthy food and the working out.

Yoga is a valuable tool in fighting depression, among a host of other diseases and disorders. I hope my experience at the Ashram inspires you to try yoga even if you don’t have depression. Nothing can go wrong, can it?