Yogi with deep passion

“It’s great to have a day which allows you to take a pause from the daily grind of life,” he explains, prepping to celebrate the summer solstice with more than just postures. Aside of the usual suspects like yoga workshops (complete with Turkey’s Franz Andrini, Yamini Muthanna and Prasad Bhatdundi), this one is going to complete the powerful reunion of the body and mind with Sufi mediation, sensorial and digital yoga art and retail therapy to replenish your energy. But Hemanth does not see the life of a yogi as removed from reality, or demanding austerity. He feels, “Yoga is all-encompassing. It’s the way you see things, the way you speak to people.”

Despite being packed with accounts and ledgers as part of his commerce degree at Sri Bhagawan Mahaveer Jain College, Hemanth never gave up on his mat. “My family wanted me to become a CA but that’s something about me — I love breaking rules and that’s how I got into teaching yoga, breaking the monotony of working a 9 to 5 job,” says the young guru whose students stand between the ages of seven and seventy! “With time, we have lost our sense of rootedness and yoga takes us back to that,” says Hemanth who even turned down job offers from Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and another by Bharat Thakur in Russia, to be his own master. Now, the founder of Soulyogacycle, an initiative to innovate and experiment creative ways to promote yoga amongst the young, “I’ve realised that when I teach, I learn so much more. When I practice what I learn, I can fine tune my teaching too,” says the man who even taught classes for over eight hours everyday. Helping his students address issues like weight loss, migraine, hypertension and plain old stress through yoga, Hemanth stresses on innovative methods to teach. “I even started Destination Yoga recently, where yoga is integrated into treks at places of silence,” he says, even adding on digital sensorial art into his classes being rolled out at schools and corporates. For this youngster, yoga is all that ‘mat’ters.