Yoga: Mountains vs City
The Mountains: A temple of awareness and grounding zone
Living in the mountains now feels like a true original ashram. It’s here that the practices of asana, pranayama, and dhyana find their natural setting. Without distractions, discipline is not forced, it flows. The clean air, rich in oxygen and prana, nourishes both breath and brain. The water is pure, the temperatures honest, neither force-fed by artificial climate control nor dictated by urban urgency.
This environment acts as a stabilizer. It slows down the nervous system, which in turn sharpens the mind. For someone whose days are immersed in tech activities and using modern screen devices, the effects are profound. Thinking becomes layered and intuitive. Creativity surfaces not from effort, but from clarity.
City Visits: A Disruption to Alignment
Yet, the rhythm broke when I visited the city. It's not just the noise or the overcrowding, it's the subtle disruptions: water that doesn't energize, air that feels hollow, temperature controlled but devoid of vitality. The pranic field of the body responds instantly. Sleep is disturbed. Focus scatters. Meditation feels muffled. The city, in many ways, is a test of the inner work, but also a reminder of why the work is needed in the first place.
In the city, most people unknowingly operate in survival mode - disconnected from their breath, detached from their center, dulled by overstimulation. It’s no surprise that even the most advanced minds in tech often burn out here. Without a meditative discipline, even genius can unravel.
The Bridge Between Two Worlds
Yoga is not escape, it is engagement with life at its most refined frequency. It is a sankalpa (intention) aligned with tapas (effort). It builds a spine not just of the body, but of our entire being - mental, emotional, and spiritual. For those of us working in technology, yoga is the counterbalance to the abstractions we navigate. It anchors us in the real - the breath, the moment, the presence.
Meditation, too, evolves. It’s no longer about “calming down.” It becomes a living dialogue with silence, intelligence without noise.
Perhaps the real work now is to build a bridge, to carry the yogic frequency cultivated in the mountains into the both corridors, technology and urban life. To remain rooted while moving, still while acting. It is not easy, but it is necessary - at least for me.
In a time where artificial intelligence accelerates faster than our ethics, yoga and meditation keep us human. They connect us to something beyond mind and machine - a vast, ancient intelligence that has been guiding human consciousness long before we typed our first line of code.
Yoga and meditation aren’t retreats from modern life. They are the scaffolding on which a balanced, insightful, and meaningful life can be built.