Club hosts yoga and meditation workshop

Instead of another club with an application, interview and heated GBM, a new offering features a focus on relaxation.

On Tuesday, Penn Yoga and Meditation hosted a free workshop on relaxation and mediation, flying in instructor Mangal Aarti from Toronto to help the audience achieve transcendence.

Instead of a typical stretch form yoga class, the workshop emphasized spirituality and meditation through call and response chants of Hare Krishna tunes. Aside from focusing on relieving stress, the Maki Yoga highlights consciousness and a state of being.

Aarti has been a manager in the finance world for 15 years and has been practicing yoga and helping others find their path for 12. Before leading the group in meditation, she discussed the concept of the human search.

“We are all looking for something — searching for happiness, searching for love, searching for career,” she said, adding that she attributes this constant search to daily stress.

The meeting also included mantra meditation where the group chanted while people played instruments including a mini piano and drums. The workshop had a call and response segment with the audience repeating Aarti’s chants.

“While listening to the chants, I was able to picture myself in a place that is far more spiritual and far more peaceful,” graduate student Prithvi Karapa said.

The founder of the club, graduate student Swapnil Nankar, started the club in response to the significant amount of stress he witnesses on the Penn campus.

“If someone is peaceful inside and has unshakable consciousness from within, then negativity cannot affect them,” Nankar said. The club is open to not just undergraduate students, but also to graduate students and staff members, “as this knowledge is universal,” he said.

This club fits into this year’s theme, the year of health. Aarti said it is critical for people to remember not only to just be physically healthy but also mentally well.

To continue their focus on mental health, the club will host a monk in Houston Hall on April 21.

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