Connecting mind and body

With the scent of tea and the sound of music, the annual yoga festival continued to show people how to keep the body and mind as one.

The fourth annual Superior Yoga Festival featured a variety of yoga styles at the Lakehead University Bora Laskin building on Sunday.

Besides the exercises, the festival had demonstrations of drumming and capoeira, a stage performance called Lonely People and Indian food. All donations made went toward cancer research at the Thunder Bay Regional Health Science Centre.

Genevieve Berbube-Hayward, 25, started yoga 11 years ago and came to the festival to participate in the different types of yoga offered. She said she started yoga as a way to become more toned without strenuous workouts.

"I love yoga," Berbube-Hayward said. "I’ve done it for a long time and I like to meet new people who are interested in the same thing I am."

A few years, ago Helen Arpin, owner of Discover Yoga, worked as a personal trainer with body builders and other athletes. She started to have back problems and found her body couldn’t handle her work outs anymore.

She said she wanted a change to improve her health so she decided to try yoga.

"Yoga basically transformed my life," Arpin said. "I feel a lot better now than when I was in my 20s. Yoga gives you so much more than exercise…it is a lot richer."

Arpin became an instructor in yoga and said she wanted to offer people an alternative to exercise regiments that she said can be violent on the body.

Traditionally, yoga seeks to combine a person’s mind and body together through deep breathing and meditation techniques. Arpin said the more oxygen the body takes in the better.

“The body really likes yoga," she said. "It’s been around for 5,000 years so it’s tried, tested and true. Fads come and go but yoga is forever."

Dr. Prashant Jani, organizer for the Superior Yoga Festival, said the festival started out small and grew each year.

Jani moved to Thunder Bay to work as a physician four years ago and said he wanted to give something back to the community and decided to start a festival aimed at introducing people to yoga.

"Everyone is trying to be healthy," Jani said. "We do exercises, we do diets and we do so many other things. However, no one can maintain it for a longtime because there are some restraints in any activities that we perform. Yoga is one field where you don’t have to go to the gym or purchase expensive equipment. You can do it at home without anything."

The most important aspect of yoga is the mental conditioning and ensuring the mind continues to stay strong, he said. Good concentration, memory and intelligence are the qualities of a strong mind and depending on what type of yoga, a session could be as long as 10 minutes, he said.

"This is my passion," he said. "This is how we make friends and life is about making friends."