In fact, in the beginning, I did not believe that yoga could be practiced at home online. I always thought that there should be a teacher to demonstrate in front of us. The teacher does adjustments for our wrong postures and when we get lazy, he will encourage us to try our very best.
However, I was very wrong. Kiran is at his Mysore home in India, while most of his students are 5000 kilometers away in China, and for a few even further away. But the internet connected us like there no differences in time zones or location.
At the end of January, Kiran was very worried about the Corona Virus epidemic situation in China. He would often ask students about how life was going on. When he found out that everyone was locked up at home, he decided to conduct yoga classes through the internet. After doing some research, he started to call everyone up and got us to take his online classes. The first class was on February 1st, and everyone felt pretty good after it. Next day, Kiran lead us to chant 108 times Gayatri Mantra and meditation as a prayer for Wuhan.
Kiran suggested to have class 4 times a week. A few of us discussed this and felt it is not right to let the teacher to teach for free, so we decided to collect a token fee from everybody.
One month has passed. How do we feel about the online courses? Kiran's online classes are different from his normal studio classes. Consider the current lifestyle of all the students, his online courses are very much focusing on improving our physical fitness, strengthening our immune system and digestion system. Getting muscle strength and losing weight was a bonus. Online yoga requires us to have more concentrations and body & mind awareness. When the teacher points out how to do the poses and we have to adjust by ourselves. We now need to do it all on our own.
Although it is across the screen, but we feel we are at the same place with Kiran and all others who practicing together. Well, what is the difference compare to other online class in Dou (抖音) or Yi（一直播). His class is not one man talking but Interactive. Kiran is not only able to demonstrate poses, adjust our poses but also remind us Jiayou 加油 when we want to get lazy.
It is amazing how much we can feel Kiran's energy from 5000 miles away, and all energy from others transferring from various location across the globe. We love to hear Kiran's voice: observe your breathing, observe the changes, last 10,9,8,7…..zero. Practicing yoga online together has become one of the highlights of our daily life.
Every session brought about its own delightful surprises, Kiran would live stream outdoors and we can hear all kinds of exotic birds singing, chickens crowing, and once even a large gaggle of wild geese flying majestically across the sky. He would live stream the views from Chamandi Hill and we would watch the trains passing by from far. He would show us the various plants and fruits in his home garden: coconut trees, banana trees, a jackfruit tree, the flowers, and herbs. We even got to meet his friend who said hi . Recently, during one morning class, we did sun salutation by watching the Mysore sunrise from the screen. Amazing. I could almost feel the warm sunlight shining on to us as if we were actually there in Mysore.
In addition, we also enjoyed the wonderful chants by our friend's daughter, amused at a cat walking around our friend when she was doing her poses, and the dog that pounced in at the end of the class happy to finally regained the attention of its owner... So maybe in the future, the cat will demonstrate cat pose, and the dog will do upward facing dog and downward facing dog……
