Bhakti Yoga: What Yoga and Indian Culture Taught Me About Wholeness
When most people think of yoga, they picture stretching, poses, maybe some deep breathing. That’s what I thought too. Until I actually lived it. I recently spent time at Swasti Yoga Center in Pune, India, doing a residential yoga teacher training. And to be honest, it changed something in me. I came in thinking I was just going to move my body and learn some new techniques. But what I experienced was much deeper. Yoga, I realized, isn’t just something you do. It’s something you live. It’s a whole way of being. As a doctor, I’ve always believed in science. I still do. But after seeing patient after patient come in with high blood pressure, fatigue, digestive issues, chronic pain, depression, I started to notice a pattern. Yes, we prescribe medications, we order tests, we label things. But we rarely ask: what’s really going on in this person’s life? So many of the problems we treat are rooted in stress. And yet, the way we practice medicine mostly focuses on the symptoms. We give a pill, and maybe the blood pressure goes down. But the stress is still there. The anxiety is still there. The lifestyle that created the problem in the first place is untouched. That’s where yoga makes sense. It doesn’t just treat the body. It treats the whole person. It gives you tools to manage your thoughts, regulate your breath, sit with yourself, and actually feel what’s going on. It helps you reconnect with your body, with your mind, with the present moment. At Swasti, I started to understand yoga as a lifestyle, not just an hour-long practice on a mat. It’s in how you wake up, how you eat, how you move through the day, how you treat others, how you treat yourself. It’s in the quiet moments of reflection, the way you breathe through difficulty, and even in the rituals that seem small at first but end up meaning so much. One of the most beautiful parts of my training was experiencing Bhakti yoga, the path of devotion. We visited the ISKCON temple, and I remember feeling this overwhelming sense of calm and connection, even though I didn’t grow up with these traditions. There was music, chanting, offerings, people gathered together with a shared intention. It wasn’t about religion. It was about feeling. About surrender. About letting go of the ego, the rush, the need to be in control all the time. Something I found so fascinating, and honestly really misunderstood by a lot of people, is the role of gods in Indian spirituality. To an outsider, it might just look like worshipping statues. But when you stay long enough to listen and ask, you realize these gods are actually symbols. They each represent something deeply human. Krishna, for example, represents love and joy and playfulness. Shiva is about transformation and letting go. These aren’t just names. They’re reflections of the human journey. And the rituals, the statues, the prayers, the mantras, they help make these ideas feel real. They give people something to hold onto, something physical that reflects something spiritual. And that’s powerful. If we want to truly help people heal, we can’t just hand them a prescription and send them on their way. We need to help them create a life that supports healing. That includes nutrition, movement, sleep, emotional safety, connection, and yes, stress reduction. Yoga gives us that framework. Not to replace medicine, but to make it more effective. Because real health isn’t just about fixing what’s broken. It’s about creating wholeness. Healing doesn’t always come in big dramatic moments. Sometimes, it’s in waking up early to sit in silence. In chanting a mantra that softens something inside you. In simply being still with yourself and feeling a sense of presence. Yoga reminded me that peace isn’t found outside. It’s something we build, moment by moment, within. – Rodan Alqudah
