Yogaveler Blog | Yoga Lifestyle, Philosophy and Travel

Discover How the Train From Jay’s Home to the Ashram Changes His life

Sometimes when people see all this Instagram stuff and say, ” Wow, you have a beautiful job” I often smile to myself and wish they could see how difficult it was to start with.

Every day you spend so many hours practicing, reading, and going it over and over again.  

The longest journey that I made was taking a train from home to the ashram. I can never forget the day when I took that train. It was as if I was moving towards an uncertain future.

I promised myself that I would never go back to my job no matter what, even if it means sleeping on the streets.

In my college days, I loved to read literature. I would read it in both Hindi and English. My love for literature comes from my father as he was such a good storyteller. He always had a story to tell as he spent most of his time traveling through the Jungles as it was part of his job.

Whenever he was there he would always tell the stories in his very manly strong voice. Even during exam days, I loved reading amazing works by Indian and foreign writers.

I would pick a book and sit near a lake and read the books with the utmost interest. It was my father’s wish that I should be an Engineer and at that point in time, Computer engineering was big fad.

I don’t know but some kids are not meant to sit in classrooms, I was one of them. It was not my fault, I had his genes of a traveler.

While sitting in the classrooms my mind would always be outside of class, my favorite past time was always to go to the forest and sit below the trees.

I kind of felt safer in the forest than on the streets, it was very strange but I had this love for the forest from the beginning.

During school days, I had to walk a few kilometers and I would take the way through a small forest.

Every day I would see a group of 40 to 50 vultures sitting in that small flat land on the way to my school.

Most often I would not go to school and sit below a banyan tree and open my lunch box, take a nice meal and play around that tree, and leave after a few hours.

My father would later find out and will get really upset, but love for forest comes to me from him, all his life he traveled to the most distant forest in India as it was his job and he loved it too.

 📷 Jay Shukla @jaysus_on_the_highway

After doing Engineering I joined a job as a software engineer, but it was kind of you to go to the office at 9 and then there was no fixed time to come back.

I wondered if it would be nice to see the sunset every day, I started to miss this excitement that I always had in my life.

Every day while on my to the office I would ask myself, is it something I want to do all my life?

I wanted to wake up everyday feeling excited about what I am going to do for the rest of the day.

There is a line from a movie that I really like,” Zindagi jine ke do hi tarike, ya too jo chal raha hai chain do, ya pair zimedari Uthao. ( there are two ways to live life, one is to live as it is or to take responsibility)”.

It was not easy to be a Yoga teacher as all my friends were working in IT companies taking home big salaries and buying new cars.

Sometimes I would ask myself whether I was on the right path, that I took the right decision.

But now these don’t question don’t bother me, I believe everyone has their destiny, everyone has their own story.

I don’t have to live someone else’s life. My path is to walk on this path with honesty and those who want to stay with me, will stay no matter what. Love makes you strong, it makes you free.

At the end everything is dust and sand my friend, what we will leave behind is how we loved and made others feel.

I now live with a firm belief, “Sab Ram karte hai, Sab Ram Karate hai. Everything Rama Does, Everything Rama makes you do.”

I loved what Shri Pattabhi Jois used to tell his students, “Everything is coming.”

Most often people will think, oh good things are coming. But he said everything is coming. That good, bad, ugly every kind of stuff is coming.

All the things that are hidden are coming out so you can release them and be free.

BE FREE my friend.

This is my story.

(Jay Yogi Story from India)

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