In 2009 I was working full time in IT. I was part of a team at Satyam Computers delivering requirements for some of the largest companies in the world. The work was demanding, the hours were long, and the pressure was constant. From the outside, everything looked fine. From the inside, there was a heaviness I could not name and had stopped trying to.
That year, a colleague mentioned the Art of Living Foundation and the Sudarshan Kriya breathwork programme. I was skeptical. I was a data-driven professional. I needed evidence, not experience. But something made me attend.
My first guided meditation was in the voice of Gurudev Sri Sri Ravishankar ji.
I will not try to describe in clinical terms what happened over those three days. Something shifted at a level I had not known was possible. The heaviness that had accumulated over years of high-pressure corporate life began to release, breath by breath, layer by layer. I slept differently. I thought differently. I felt lighter in a way that had nothing to do with the physical body.
What I experienced was not relaxation. It was transformation.
I did not leave IT immediately. That was not the right move and I knew it. But from 2009 I began volunteering with the Art of Living Foundation, supporting programmes, sharing what I had received, while continuing to deliver requirements for Barclays, GSK, Mastercard, Cisco, GE Power and British Petroleum.
In 2012 I began teaching yoga voluntarily in corporate offices and rooms. The mat became the second classroom alongside the project room.
In 2019, when I finally left IT and committed fully to yoga, healing and wellness, one of the most significant milestones of that year was becoming a certified Art of Living teacher with the blessings of Gurudev.
Today I teach the same Sudarshan Kriya workshop that changed my own life in 2009. I watch students arrive carrying the same heaviness I once carried — the accumulated weight of demanding professional lives, of deadlines and pressure and the constant noise of a busy mind. And I watch them leave lighter.
To have received something so profound in 2009, and to be trusted to pass it on today — there are no words adequate for that privilege.
If you are a working professional reading this and something in you recognises what I am describing — the heaviness, the sense that something important is being crowded out by the pace of your life — I would invite you to experience Sudarshan Kriya for yourself. Not because I can promise you what it will do. But because it did something for me that nothing else had, and in fifteen years of teaching I have watched it do something profound for thousands of others.