"We call it introductory because we're introducing you to your muscles." -Yogi in Pushkar
Somewhere between the yoga studio and the end of my scooter ride through the rice patty fields, it strikes me that I lead a very stressful life back in business school.
Yoga is about healing, the body and the soul. This truth is imparted to me by the Brits and Euros who teach the Ashantaga school of yoga from Mysore. Stretching, sweating, breathing. It's a search for spiritual, mental and physical balance through release of the negative energy that's stored up in our body and mind over successively hectic days.
Of course this all sounds like new age hippy mumbo jumbo... until you try it. Words aren't really sufficient. To understand the language of yoga, you need to move and breath, then sit completely still.
Then it strikes me personally, ahead of this major looming job search, that some career pursuits are going to cause more harm than good to me and the people I know and love. Oy! What a bad time for another epiphany!! But it's pretty clear, some work is bound to create strife for and some alternatives to resolve it.
I'm not saying it's possible to classify whole occupations. Labeling work in a sustainable enterprise or a handicraft workshop or a monastic cell as "good" or "healing" would be just as much an oversimplification as calling work in an investment bank or a high-tech startup or an economic policy think tank as "bad" or "harmful."
But in order for work to lead to health and happiness, I think it must be based on motivations that are genuinely positive, that arise from a desire to contribute to the social stock rather than one's brokerage account. To sustain that contribution, one needs a work-life balance too.
Why sign up for a hellish job thinking it will enable you to make a greater impact later on? It seems, to me anyway, like an unnecessary dose of chemotherapy -- a painful treatment with no guarantee to heal.
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