Mar 04, 2014 05:53 PM
8044 Views
I am not a native of Andhra and I absolutely do not speak or understand Telugu (and I blame myself for that because learning a language is just not possible for me).
Before joining the class I was told by Jagan guruji that the lectures will be exclusively in Telugu which I will not understand but the key points and the asana's will be explained in English. He also said that there are foreigners who took his class. So with an open mind I joined the Level 1 class that lasts for 21 days. After day 13, I quit the program and here are my reasons. There are probably people who benefit from it and if it worked for you then great. But not so in my case because:-
1) Not only the lectures, but the asana's are also explained fully in Telugu with some random English keywords (mostly directives like Up, Down, Left, right, etc) are thrown in English. They do have demos but its only shown once (and rarely twice for a chosen few asana's). With the Demo I can understand the basic postures etc but the internal stuff like how to breathe, or how the breathing sound should be etc is very very hard to follow (unless ofcourse if you know English). After 2 days when I met guruji, he said that its not a problem and I will follow the exercises as they will explain again. But that never happened. So the number of asana's taught in the class piled up and my knowledge did not increase a bit. Probably you might think that I am dumb, but isn't the conventional wisdom tells us that practicing any yoga asana with half-cooked knowledge is dangerous. So I expected them to at least explain the asana's in English (and yes they do speak English, its just that they choose not to).
2) The class is overcrowded. Yes, just too many people in a small room. So you can practice the breathing exercises in sitting down position fine. But for surya namaskar etc either you will be smelling someone's feet or you will be kicking someone's head with your own feet. Mind that my height is just average 5.6" and still I had problems. So I had to skip some steps from Surya namaskar. Its very easy to calculate the ideal class size based on the room size but no, they don't do that due to commercial reasons.
3) I do not mind the food restrictions that they have for a detox process on day 14. They do serve food (you need to pay extra around 2000Rs/- for 2 weeks). I chose to get food from them. But because I dont understand the instructions in Telugu regarding the care to be taken on food items (and they don't explain in English), I ended up vomiting for two continuous days due to their food. I do not blame the food though (as others who had the same food did not have any problems). But I guess I missed on the points that were mentioned to take care regarding food and hence ended up in getting impacted. After endless vomiting for 2 days, I finally decided to call it quits and came out of the program. I am confident that I will not get any refund and I am not even going to claim one. But had some one who had taken the class before (it has been running for quite some years now), I would have read it and then taken my decision to join the class or not. So here is my first review hoping that others benefit out of it at least in their decision making.
Please do note that the classes are genuine and the guru is also an expert. So there is no cheating or scam here. Its just that it's restricted to people who speak Telugu and who do not mind an overcrowded place. Sadly its not suitable for me and I still have to search for someone who can properly teach me basic yoga. Please do let me know if you know of any such place @ Hyd (near KPHB).
