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Love is in the air. Love is all around me. It is written in the wind. It’s in the whisper of the tree, it’s in the thunder of the sea.

You can instantly recognize those lines if you are familiar with western music and literature. As somebody more familiar with the eastern way of living, I find it easier to accept those lines without subscribing to their literal meaning.

No, love is not in the air. It’s not written on the tree, nor in the sea. Ask someone who is planning to hang himself on a tree in the open air. Or someone who is trying to calm his heart in the middle of a thundering sea. The same thing becomes an expression of love for some, and cause of death and despair for others.

Let’s take a more common and comparable example. Two persons reach a very scenic place in a perfect weather together. One may become ecstatic, while the other might say, “Well, it looks good. So what?” They don’t enjoy it equally. Why is that?

Ask the scientists, they will say there’s no difference when different people see the same tree or sea or feel the same air. What they see is light reflecting and entering their retinas. What they hear is soundwaves touching their eardrums. What they feel is an external substance touching their skin. These generate impulses in the neurons, which are carried to the brain where an image is formed. So the process is the same, the mechanics the same. Therefore everybody should feel the air, see the tree, and hear the thunder of the sea in the exact same way.

But it doesn’t happen like that. There is something beyond the neurons and the brain. Along with the neuronal impulses and formation of an image in the brain, our mind comes to work. It starts labeling those images: I like it, I don’t like it, I want more of it, I want it to go away, and so on. A related emotion emerges. We feel attracted to it, start despising it, loving it, or hating it. Sometimes we have a mixed feeling and we neither love nor hate.

Simply put, we know about external objects when light or sound waves (or something like that) form an image in the brain. The actual perception happens not in the brain but in our mind, which immediately starts judging this perception. And instantly our liking or disliking starts. When our mind is in the state of liking, we judge things to be likable. And when the mind is in the state of disliking, we dislike everything. Our mind labels things based on its own present state.

So when we say love is out there, it means our mind is in the state of liking things. When it is at peace and ease, everything around seems lovely. It’s our mind that projects love in the air, tree, or sea. Love is in us, not out there.

After enlightenment, Siddhartha Gautam met his five former ascetic companions to share his experience. He said, “Monks, let me tell you about the truth of suffering.”

It may sound strange for an enlightened person to talk of such a seemingly trivial thing. Who wouldn’t know about suffering? And he was talking to the ascetics who were walking examples of suffering! They ate a few grains of food in many days, just enough not to die. They slept on cold, hard floors of cremation grounds. They denied themselves even the tiniest and pettiest things of comfort. Being their former colleague, Siddhartha knew suffering wasn’t new to them. But he still had to talk about it. Why? To liberate them from suffering—the real one which had nothing to do with their bodies, but with their minds.

The five ascetics thought the body was a prison for their soul—the pure substance that they needed to free. The idea of liberating the soul from suffering became their fixation. When something becomes a fixation, one can go to any length. But the enlightened Siddhartha knew the poor guys would get nowhere by torturing their bodies. They needed to fix their minds.

From what the Buddha taught, we know he was helping people live a life of peace and contentment. It would be a life free of dissatisfaction, of course. To find freedom from something, first we need to realize it exists. A physician has to tell the patient that they have certain disease so that they can take the medicine. Likewise, the Buddha tells us to wake up to suffering, or the pains and dissatisfactions, of life. 

There are obvious pains that we all face and see: birth, disease, old-age, death. There are natural disasters and pandemics. But there are less severe and less visible everyday pains as well. We have to live with people we don’t like. Our boss refuses us to grant leave from work and our long-planned trek to the mountains is canceled. When we desperately want to have a fresh lime soda, the waiter says they have run out of lemons. After finding a perfect ‘soulmate’, we cling to the ‘bliss’ of their company and fear losing it. The list is endless.

While the grosser ones like disease and old-age are physical, the subtler ones happen in the mind. Death or separation may only happen once, but the fear of it haunts us all the time. We are all trying to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic right now. The virus may or may not affect us at the physical level, but at the mental level it has already deeply affected us. We create most of our sufferings in the mind.

So what does it mean? Often, we are born and we die without actually knowing what’s happening. Most of us fail to see these things as suffering—they form part of ordinary routine life. Ignorance may be bliss, and if you are happy with it, that’s okay. But that’s not a wise choice. Knowing is more interesting than not knowing. Recognizing our subtle sufferings and knowing how our minds create them may open us to a higher possibility, just like the Buddha and other enlightened masters.

On May 1, a man in Kathmandu’s Baneshwor committed suicide by consuming Celphos, a pesticide used to preserve grains. While the police are still investigating, family and neighbors reported he had become bankrupt and did not have a grain left to eat. His small eatery was closed and he was under a huge debt.

Since the start of the lockdown on March 24, a total 1105 people committed suicide across the country (as of May 30) as per Nepal Police. This puts the average daily suicides at 16.25, which used to be about 14 before the lockdown. Sixty-nine people killed themselves in the Kathmandu Valley in this time.

Although it is too early to draw definite conclusions and connect this to the pandemic and lockdown, the link cannot be altogether denied as well. The general stress level of the people—the harbinger of all mental illnesses—has definitely spiked.

Dr Kapil Dev Upadhyaya, senior psychiatrist and consultant at the Center for Mental Health and Counselling-Nepal, says the real picture of pandemic-induced mental health issues is yet to surface.

He and his colleagues get calls from patients who are, among other things, unable to sleep. Lockdown stress has increased the risk of relapse for patients who were showing signs of progress, according to Dr Upadhyaya. The cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), suicides, alcohol abuse, depression, and anxiety could further rise after the lockdowns, he reckons.

Stress of stigma

Perhaps the long-term impact of Covid-19 would be more on mental than physical health. Mental health professionals have been raising alarms worldwide. The American Psychological Association reports, “Covid-19 has brought a raft of intense new stressors while removing many of the resources people have traditionally used to cope with stress.” Millions of people have lost their jobs and some even their homes and businesses.

The social stigma attached to the virus may be more dangerous than the virus itself, according to Dr Ritesh Thapa, a consultant psychiatrist and director of Lalitpur-based Rhythm Neuropsychiatry Hospital and Research Center.

“The problem is the way we have made it so big. But it is just a virus! We often get infected with a virus, and we get cured. We have already been through HIV-AIDS, Ebola, and leprosy. But in this case, the social stigma has been too much,” says Dr Thapa. Anybody suspected of having it is stigmatized and treated as an outcast. People in quarantine fare no better; so much so they start feeling guilty, leading to multiple psycho-social problems.

Dr Thapa and his team get several calls every day from patients with complaints related to depression or anxiety. Many of them have suicidal thoughts. One patient whom he suggested to get hospitalized refused to do so and later attempted suicide. He failed.

Dr Thapa too reckons not enough people are reporting psychological problems. “We can tell from previous pandemics and public health crises in other countries that it’s going to explode afterward.”

Worldwide, experts have been warning the governments that the next crisis will be economic, and will directly impact people’s mental health. In Thailand, the number of people committing suicide due to economic hardship is predicted to exceed the number of coronavirus deaths.

Besides many economic factors, unemployment resulting from Covid-19 alone might, in the worst case, result in 9,570 additional annual suicide deaths globally, says the UK-based medical journal The Lancet.

Many names of misery

Dr Thapa gets calls from three types of people who report economic hardship. First, entrepreneurs who are under stress due to monetary loss and pressure to repay bank loans. Second, daily wage earners and small-time employees who live in rented rooms. Under pressure to pay rent and buy food, they often complain of “feeling lowly and lonely, and feeling like crying.” The third type is comprised of the youths from outside Kathmandu who are working students in the city. They complain of being stuck in the Valley without jobs and of having depressive thoughts.

Socio-economic trauma of the pandemic is already being felt across the world, as a result of which the number of psychological illnesses and suicides could spike.

On March 30, the finance minister of Germany's Hesse state, Thomas Schaefer, committed suicide after apparently losing hope over the virus’s economic impact. On April 26, Dr Lorna Breen, a top emergency room doctor at a Manhattan hospital, committed suicide. She was one of the frontline medicos treating coronavirus patients.

In India, a 50-year-old Covid-19 patient committed suicide in Stanley Government Hospital, Chennai, on May 26. The next morning, another 57-year-old patient who was isolated for coronavirus symptoms killed himself in Tamil Nadu Government Multi Super Specialty Hospital.

In Britain, Emily Owen, a 19-year-old waitress from Kings Lynn in Norfolk, died in hospital after a suicide attempt in late March. She was “unable to cope with the isolation.” A few days earlier, she had warned relatives that more people would die from suicide during this time than from the virus itself.

Suicide is likely to become a more pressing concern as the pandemic spreads and leaves behind longer-term effects on the general population, the economy, and vulnerable groups, The Lancet writes.

Suicidal facts

According to a study by the Well Being Trust and researchers affiliated with the American Academy of Family Physicians, suicide and substance abuse-related deaths resulting from coronavirus are likely to increase. In the US, such additional deaths may go as high as 154,000 in the next 10 years depending on the impact on the economy. Suicide cases are already high in the country, with 48,344 people killing themselves in 2018, as per the data of the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Likewise, a spike in suicides triggered by Covid-19 lockdowns is expected to exceed deaths from the actual virus in Australia, according to researchers from Sydney University’s Brain and Mind Center. In the best-case scenario, suicide rates will increase 25 percent in the country, Professor Ian Hickie of the university said in early May. Suicide rates could increase 50 percent over the next five years if the national economy continues to deteriorate for more than a year. This would add 750 to 1,500 suicides to the annual Australian average of 3,000, the study predicts.

Nepal has not evaluated the impending economic and mental consequences of the Covid-19 crisis. The focus has been on continuing the lockdown, without a plan for addressing the psycho-social issues that will later emerge. Reports from our southern border paint a grim picture of the quarantine facilities. People spending time there, who are already facing social stigma, could also go on to develop debilitating psycho-social problems, warns Dr Thapa.

There have been sporadic reports of people suffering from loneliness, desperation due to loss of jobs and businesses, and domestic violence amid the pandemic lockdown. They are yet to be fully assessed and reported. Waiting for the pandemic to be over and lockdowns to be fully lifted might be fatal. As Dr Thapa suggests, it is wiser to take preventive measures now than allow the problem to grow and later burst—with potentially unimaginable consequences.

Karma is not fate. It’s not destiny. Fate is a quick fix, karma is not. Fate or destiny is not the teaching of truly enlightened masters. It is the creation of defeatist and escapist minds that refuse to take responsibility.

We may think that it must be fate when there is no other way to explain things. A close one dies. A friend turns foe. Or a crow poops on your suit just as you are entering a building for a crucial business meeting. You become resentful and it reflects in your meeting. The deal is ruined. 

The question haunts: Why should it happen to me? You get disturbed, but somehow you collect yourself by blaming your fate, or God. That’s better than going crazy over the crow, isn’t it?

So why don’t the truly enlightened masters teach us about fate? Why do they only teach about karma? It’s due to their motivation. For the Buddha, the motivation is to help people find a sustainable way out of their suffering. He would never teach you any quick fix. Fate can give you some relief, but only briefly. After accepting that the crow poop was an act of fate, your next resentment would be: Why this fate for me? Why now? Why should destiny play a joke on me?

If you had known karma, you would view it differently. You would try to clean the poop with whatever you have, and go to the meeting. If needed, you would quickly explain what happened and proceed. You would trust your business partners to understand. The meeting would go smoothly.

By knowing karma, you could actually be a better fatalist! If you had known karma as the Buddha taught, you would take responsibility for what you do, not what the crow does. You would let fate do what it does, and chose your response responsibly. You would take the RIGHT ACTION now—at each present moment available to you—and leave the rest to ‘fate’. You would trust that a right action would lead to a right result. 

The Buddha’s teaching about karma is about understanding that when causes and conditions come together, it will lead to certain results. His motivation is to encourage people to apply this knowledge to create healthy states of mind. So instead of blaming the crow, he would ask you to be mindful of your anger and resentment, take the right action of wiping your suit, and get into the meeting room with a calm and forgiving mind. Your choice of action would create a healthy state of mind. You would create good karma.

Without shifting the blame on anyone or anything, karma tells us that our present condition is the consequence of certain causes and conditions coming together in the past. Some of them are our doing, some aren't. There must be a multiple of causes for anything to happen. For the crow to fly over your head, maybe there was a dead rat across the street that it was trying to pick. Maybe the garbage picker didn't see it in the morning because his eyesight was weak. There could be a thousand causes. We can't go back in the past and fix all those things.

But that's only half of the story. Karma teaches us to look forward. We choose a healthy response NOW and make the right efforts so that the right causes and conditions are created for the future. At the same time, we know we cannot control everything that may influence the result. So we do our bit sincerely and let the result unfold. Karma will then make a good sense for us. 

The device in which you are reading this article will be junked in a couple years. The hand that is holding it won’t be there in the next hundred years. The eyes that are reading it will stop seeing one day.

Everything changes. The sun, earth, moon—everything. Our bodies, houses, mountains, roads, rivers, forests, they are changing. By the time you finish reading this article, millions of cells in your body will have changed.

It rarely occurs to us that our cars will stop running one day and our loved ones will either go away or die. Even if they stick around, the ‘love’ will change. We don't realize it, because it seems so solid, the whole world seems so intact.

But some people can see it.

Impermanence was the trigger that caused Prince Siddhartha to leave his illusive world one full moon night. We know the story—He saw an old man, a sick man, and a corpse on his tour to the town. He came to know about change and suffering. He realized that his own body that he held so dear, and his wife and son and father whom he loved so much, would also change. They would grow old, get ill, and die one day. That realization changed not only his life, but also those of countless more people in the past two and half millennia.

After enlightenment, Siddhartha spent his life teaching people about impermanence. He told them that failure to see impermanence caused them suffering. He said even a few seconds of meditation on impermanence would bring people infinite merits.

An inspiring story. But chances are, we simply discard it as something great happening only to great people. It cannot affect ordinary people like us. We cannot be Buddhas.

Or there may be denial altogether—Prince Siddhartha was already enlightened; he didn't need to see suffering to free himself from worldly allures. We see old and sick and dead people all the time, but nothing happens. See, we are still safe in our homes, we still have our morning coffee, and we have all the worldly duties, and friends to attend to. Come on, it must have been something deeper and bigger for him.

The mind is a magnificent trickster. Somebody saw impermanence and the whole world changed. He lived it and preached it. A great event happened in the history of mankind. But our mind doesn’t like the idea that things change, and ensures that we don’t learn it—neither from the person’s life story that signifies the realization of change, nor from his direct teachings. No wonder that we are not Buddhas.

Born near the mountains of eastern Sankhuwasabha district, Ramesh Dhungel did not like the idea of going to the US to study Nepal’s Himalayas. But that was almost three decades ago, and he did not have a better option at home.

Prof. Ramesh Dhungel

He used to work at the Tribhuvan University's Center for Nepal and Asian Studies (CNAS) back in the 1980’s. His contemporaries often talked about going to the West for further studies, but he did not like it. A gold medalist in cultural studies from the Tribhuvan University, he drew inspiration from Nepal’s noted historian and epigraphist Pandit Dhanavajra Vajracharya. But as destiny would have it, he embarked for the US in 1992 for higher studies, first and briefly to George Mason University and then to Columbia University, where he spent five years. Then director of CNAS, Kumar Khadga Bikram Shah, who appreciated Dhungel's scholarship, granted him an academic leave.

An MPhil and PhD from Columbia University and author of a number of acclaimed publications, Professor Ramesh Dhungel needs no introduction. He is one of the few Nepali scholars that academics and journalists from home and abroad seek out on Himalayan cultures, heritage, history, and Buddhist studies. His PhD thesis, which was later published as a book, The Kingdom of Lo (Mustang): A Historical Study, serves as a primer for the study of the hidden kingdom of Mustang. 

“At first, I didn't feel good about it. I kept thinking, ‘Why should I go to Britain or the US to study my own heritage?’” recalls Dhungel. “But then, everybody talked about the high academic standards of American and British universities. So I went for an educational experience.”

Studying in Columbia was transformative in many ways. “The academic rigor there was extraordinary. There were unlimited resources for a student with limited time. Libraries opened whole night with access to millions of books and journals. Even rare books about Nepal that are not available in Nepal were there,” he recalls.

“I could have done PhD at Tribhuvan University also. But I would not get the best education. In Columbia, you could learn from the best professors from around the world,” Dhungel says. “They made every effort to ensure that research conformed to utmost objectivity and precision. A postgraduate research from a university like Columbia adds to the stock of existing knowledge, as we often say in academia.”

When in New York, the thought of how Nepal lacked a good academic program in Himalayan cultures and heritages constantly gnawed at him. Even back then he harbored a wish to start a world-class academic center in Nepal for Himalayan studies. Years later, he and a few colleagues were able to establish the Department of Buddhist Studies at Tribhuvan University, Nepal’s biggest and oldest center of higher learning.  

But Dhungel wished to run programs with exclusive focus on Himalayan Buddhism, for which the department wasn’t enough. So he started Lumbini College of Buddhist and Himalayan Studies in 2012 with an affiliation from Lumbini Buddhist University. Situated inside the premises of Hyatt Regency in Kathmandu, the program has ties with the Technical University of Berlin.

“As is evident from the name, we focus on Himalayan Buddhism. Our programs are unique in the sense that nowhere in the world will you find such courses on Buddhism focusing on the study of Buddhist heritage and history of the Himalayas. We emphasize Buddhist art and architecture, philosophy, and language studies,” says Dhungel.

Building on the unique blend of Buddhism with cultures and history of the Himalayan region, Professor Dhungel has high hopes from the master's degree program in Buddhism and Himalayan Studies (MBHS), which is his brainchild. Major subjects offered include: Buddhist art and architecture, traditional heritage conservation, discourse analysis and hermeneutics, Buddhism in Nepal Himalaya, Buddhist philosophy, and history. Two major source languages of Buddhism—Tibetan and Sanskrit—are also taught. The program is run fully in English medium.

“Our aim is to draw students from across the world,” Dhungel adds. “We may not beat Columbia or Oxford in terms of size and resources, but for the study of our Himalayan heritage and Buddhist tradition, nobody can beat us.”

Going by Dhungel’s qualifications and commitment, the goal is not difficult. Says Umesh Regmi, a MBHS alumnus and now department head in Buddhist studies at Padma Kanya Campus: “You don't need to talk about the qualifications of Professor Dhungel, a renowned scholar. The program offered there is highly beneficial for anyone in the world who wants to study Himalayan Buddhism.”

Regmi, who has been closely observing the college since its inception, asserts that a combination of Himalayan heritage with core Buddhist studies and source languages makes MBHS a potent program. “The program follows standard international semester and grading system. It was a great learning experience for me too.”

Dhungel aims to make the MBHS the most sought after program in Himalayan Buddhist studies. “We have the mountains, we have rich culture, and we are the land of the Buddha. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if people from the world over come to Nepal to study our Buddhist heritage?”

Why Himalayan Buddhism?

Manik Ratna Shakya 

Dean, Lumbini Buddhist University

There are three major Buddhist traditions in Nepal. First, the Buddhism practiced in the Himalayan regions; second, the traditional Buddhism of Kathmandu Valley; and third, the Theravada Buddhism practiced by bhikshus and bhikshunis. These three forms of Buddhism are Nepal’s heritage.

Himalayan Buddhism has its unique features, and deserves careful protection and promotion. The program offered by Lumbini College of Buddhism and Himalayan Studies is important in this regard.

There are about 400 monasteries, big and small, in Nepal’s sparsely populated Himalayan region. They are Nepal’s great heritage. It is important to preserve them in their antiquity and all historical as well as religious attributes.

Currently, only few people know about the Buddhism and Himalayan Studies program. It needs to be publicized so that all those interested know about it and get its benefits, wherever they are in the world. 

I request Nepal government to appreciate the Himalayan heritage and support us expand this education as widely as possible.

The pandemic is killing people across the world and making them jobless, bankrupt, or mentally stressed. But it has also given a break to some lucky ones from their regular busy lives. I hope the readers of this column are reading it in the comforts of their homes.

If nothing has gone wrong, this home lockdown should be a great opportunity to generate good thoughts and work our way toward mental peace. But unfortunately, many of us are over-indulging in social media, filling our minds with all the junk, and dwelling on the gloom. We are only inviting misery for ourselves as we don’t know how to use our minds in the right way.

Praying for quick recovery of all the infected ones, I ask the fortunate ones to make best use of the extra time that has come as a bonus. This is a great privilege that won’t last long, and it is absolutely dumb to waste it on trifles. By pondering on the dearness of human life, we will know the dearness of the moments that build it. We can then set our minds on the right course.

The Buddhist philosophy holds human life extremely precious. There is a famous analogy to explain it: Suppose the entire earth is a big ocean and a blind turtle lives at its bottom. It comes up to the surface once in a hundred years. A wooden yoke with a single hole is floating on the water, drifting wherever the wind and waves take it. Now imagine the turtle emerging on the surface with its head sliding through the yoke. What a great coincidence that would be! With same rarity one gets chance to be born as a human being.

One has to move through different realms of existence, get countless births in one or more of them as per one’s orientation, and earn enough merits to be born as a human, according to Buddhism. These realms number six: gods (deva), demi-gods (asura), humans (manusya), animals (tiryag), hungry ghosts (preta), and hell beings (naraka).

The Buddha said human-realm is the most important among the six. The god-realm is characterized by all the material pleasures one can think of, but then it is afflicted with greed, passion, craving, pride, and attachment. The asuras may also have the material pleasures, and they may possess supernatural powers, but they are characterized by hatred, anger, and arrogance. With deluded minds, both gods and demi-gods cannot see their own bondages.

Only the humans have the intellect to see the sufferings of life, and understand that they could be overcome. The Buddha advises humans to use their capacity to work out their own salvation. He says every human has this capacity, and one should start right away, without wasting a moment of the precious life, to reach the liberating potential of the human mind.

That is great news. Far better to dwell on than the junk many of us keep feeding our minds with.

Due to the Covid-19 lockdown, going to your local gym or sports club may not be an option right now. Nor is it easy to arrange for these facilities in our homes. But to do yoga, you need only a mat and a little willpower. Yoga is a proven technique of maintaining health and vigor, and one that we inherit from our ancient saints. It is the next best thing after ‘Namaste’ that the Indian Subcontinent has offered the world to beat the corona scare. 

As most people are locked up in their houses, they are worried about their health. Limited physical movement weakens the body, and makes it susceptible to attack by pathogens and chronic diseases. And the high stress during the pandemic is sure to affect your mental health. In such a scenario, yoga could be an effective tool to maintain good physical and mental health, according to Dr. Hari Prasad Pokharel, senior physician, yoga and naturopathy.

Yoga includes practices of asana (physical postures) and pranayama (breathing management). These practices are highly beneficial for strengthening the life force. “The body’s mechanism of developing antibodies and fighting diseases are strengthened through the life force or jeevani shakti,” says Pokharel. 

By the activation of this energy through the yogic practices of body and breath, we can fight not only parasite germs but also other adverse life conditions, Pokharel asserts. 

“We have plenty of time in our hands right now. We can develop our hobbies and be creative. We can also consolidate our yoga practice, if we already know it,” Pokharel adds. “If you haven’t done any yoga postures yet, you can make use of YouTube channels run by experts.”

Among the practices of breathing, Kapalbhati is an extremely good exercise for now. It strengthens both your prana energy and detoxifies your body. But one needs to be careful in starting pranayama, and should do it only under expert guidance, Pokharel cautions.

“This is a time of high stress and little physical activity. It is very important that we keep our bodies moving,” says Amrita Ghimire, chairperson of Kathmandu-based Amrita Yoga Foundation. “We should, at the least, do some joint exercises, and then start practicing simple pranayama. They help keep our bodies fit and flexible.”

To fight the Covid-19 pandemic, pranayama could be a useful tool as it develops immunity, says Ghimire. “Kapalbhati is very helpful. But people with hypertension should take precaution. You can do right nostril breathing instead. Diabetics can do left nostril breathing. You can also do Bhramari chanting, Om chanting or Nadisodhan, which are all harmless.”

Any yogic exercise that makes you sweat is helpful in boosting immunity, says Anil Ranjit, a private yoga instructor based in Kathmandu, adding that Surya Namaskar and Virbhadra Asana are particularly good. But yoga has a more important aspect, according to him. “It has to do with your spirituality. It increases your willpower. If you have a strong willpower, your ability to fight diseases will increase manifold. Then good health comes as a by-product.” 

EXPERT ADVICE

To keep the mind and body fit during the lockdown, here is some expert advice for beginners:

Body:

1. Start with Sukshma Vyayama (joint movements). Start from toes and gradually move up to the neck, moving each joint. 

2. Do a few rounds of basic Surya Namaskar

3. As you build body flexibility, move to simple asanas. These may include few postures lying on your stomach and back, such as Uttanapada asana, Nabhi Darshan asana, Nauka asana, Bhujanga asana, Salava asana, and Yana asana. 

4. As you master simple asanas, you can move to advanced ones. 

Breath:

1. Kapalbhati (boosts prana energy and detoxifies body)

2. Bhramari pranayam

3. Om chanting

Mind:

1. Breathing awareness (Anapana)

2. Positive, healthy affirmations

(As suggested by Dr. Hari Prasad Pokharel, Chairman, Yoga and Naturopathy Subject Committee, Nepal Sanskrit University) 

ONLINE YOGA 

Along with the start of the practices of lockdowns and social distancing, yoga teachers have started offering online yoga classes. Here are a few of the good ones available in Nepal.

1. Nepal Yoga Home (https://nepalyogahome.com/) 

Location: Goldhunga, near Nagarjun Jungle, Kathmandu

Classes offered: Personal yoga practice, children yoga, reflexology, yoga teacher’s training

Online platform: Nepal Yoga Home software 

Phone: (977) 9851167373 (Prakash Acharya)

Email: [email protected]

2. Yogmandu Yoga and Retreat (https://yogmandu.com/)

Location: Miteri Marg, Mid Baneshwor, Kathmandu

Classes offered: Personal yoga practice; tailor-made sessions for corporate houses, schools and colleges; yoga teacher’s training 

Online platform: Zoom Cloud

Phone: (977) 9810263277 (WhatsApp)

Email: [email protected]; [email protected]

3. Anil Ranjit

Location: Private yoga instructor

Classes offered: Private/corporate yoga sessions

Online platform: Zoom Cloud, Google Hangouts 

Phone: (977) 9848819325

Email: [email protected]

Facebook: facebook.com/anilran 

4. Amrita Yoga Foundation (http://amritayogafoundation.com/) 

Location: Jyatha, Thamel, Kathmandu

Classes offered: Therapeutic yoga, personal practice, corporate sessions, yoga teacher’s training 

Online platform: Zoom Cloud, Skype

Phone: (977) 9818282850/9851065554

Email: [email protected]

5. Kanchan Yoga (https://www.kanchanyoga.com/) 

Location: Chaksibari, Thamel, Kathmandu

Classes offered: Private/corporate yoga sessions 

Online platform: Zoom Cloud

Phone: (977) 9818148030 (Kanchan Singh Thagunna)

Email: [email protected]

6. Shilu Shrestha

Location: Private yoga instructor 

Classes offered: Private yoga sessions

Online platform: Zoom Cloud, Facebook Event

Email: [email protected] 

Facebook: facebook.com/lilsunsyn