Ramit and I are the quintessential modern-working couple. We are in a rush to leave for work every morning, battling and cursing traffic, hustling through the day, microwaving the day’s meal for dinner, eating it while watching TV, and passing out at night only to be in a rush again the next morning.
On weekends we do laundry and buy ghar ka samaan. And sometimes it would frustrate us to feel like this is how we were going to spend our entire life, get old and die. I am telling you, we didn’t even have the time to argue with each other. But this couldn’t have been the only way to exist!
One day Ramit came back home in a really foul mood. He just dumped his laptop bag on the floor, went into the bedroom and slept off without even having dinner. The next morning when I asked him what had happened, he said his boss yelled at him for something very small and he felt very humiliated as he works beyond his shift timings to get things done and isn’t even treated like a human being when there’s an error.
That’s it! I decided that I wasn’t going to let corporate toxicity take over my personal life and household. Having dinner together is all that we really got to do during weekdays, and if we continued bringing professional anger back home, then soon we wouldn’t have anything left for ourselves or each other.
So that Sunday, I found a Yoga teacher who was willing to come home in this virtual world and train us at 6 AM. ‘6 freaking AM? I will never be able to wake up!’ Ramit said, but trust me, he did, we did. And it changed our lives and our marriage.
Our Yoga sir taught us to be still, to stay calm despite distractions. To focus on the moment and on our breath. ‘THIS is all that matters in the whole world’, he said. ‘Your presence and your existence. If you focus on your breath all the time, nothing in the world will ever feel overwhelming.’
So we practiced this in our class and extended it to our time spent in traffic, at our workplace and every other situation. Nothing had changed in the world, but a lot changed within us. Ramit’s boss still yelled at him, but he remained calm, the roads were still fully blocked - but our minds remained open. We had learnt how to channelise our energies for our own wellbeing and life felt manageable.
After years, my husband and I were feeling like we were in sync. We had been spending our lives apart despite being under the same roof. Yoga opened up our bodies and our minds and that one hour of solitude followed by a cup of tea together in peace made us feel like there was more to life.
We were happier as a couple, happier in our jobs. We realized that we didn’t have to kill ourselves to earn a living, so we started leaving work on time, cooking fresh dinner and sleeping without any screen-distraction. One yoga class put us into a healthy routine. We started looking fitter and feeling better. And I cannot be more thankful to the universe for this decision of mine.
