Wall Street Yoga
by GuruNanda

I’m going to admit, I skim a lot of the emails that come into my account to see if they are truly something that interests me. But the pitch when this book was suggested to me caught my eye so I read further:

Okay… I think I can do that. I do know that I am a bundle of stress, and that doesn’t do anything for my health. (In fact, it is negative on my health. Honestly, I’ve experienced very negative health outcomes from all this stress. If I ever fix it all, I’ll post on that.)

So the book Wall Street Yoga is supposed to help de-stress in a pretty short amount of time? It’s worth exploring, right?

About the author… yes, he is GuruNanda on the book. I’ll get to the “guru” thing in a minute. Puneet Nanda was an entrepreneur, he took over his father’s toothbrush company and renamed it to Dr. Fresh and proceeded to spread the business around the globe. He worked hard, put in long hours, traveled and let all of that take a toll on his health. From junk food to not enough rest, regularly overworking until one day, at the age of 38, he was having difficulty breathing and experiencing chest pains. He ended up in the hospital where it was thought he was suffering cardiac arrest, only to determine it was a severe anxiety attack and thus serving as an awakening to him to adjust his life.

Now onto the “guru” moniker… we tend to use the word guru as if it is “expert” but the word guru means “teacher” in Sanskrit. And GuruNanda is teaching people how to rebalance their lives through the use of yoga and breathing. He was the exact model of a person who needs this, the Type-A person who doesn’t ever shut off. And this plan worked for him, so he wants to share that approach with others.

There are yoga routines in each chapter, and each chapter centers around an area that one might need help with: depression/anxiety, career, weight loss, heart health, back pain, etc. And the thing I love the most about these routines is they are straightforward and don’t include pictures of a beautiful, willowy young woman contorting herself into a pretzel. This is truly a book of yoga for anyone. And it emphasizes using yoga for exactly the things that attract me to yoga and are what brought me into it when I took my first yoga class nearly 20 years ago… yoga as a way to destress.

Yep… yoga can be great exercise. But whenever I practice with a mind of fitness, it never feels the same to me. But if I do a yoga practice with the approach that I am focusing in on myself and letting my mind “chill out already!!!” and think about lengthening my muscles that are full of life’s fatigue, that’s when it benefits me most.

I am doing a short course on meditation right now (I can post on that later when I complete it) and I’ve done a morning meditation each day for the past five days. It’s longer than 2 minutes, but it’s giving me some solid information to help get my headspace right. And obviously you don’t have to max out at 2 minutes of meditation, that’s the minimum. But as soon as my meditation course is done, then I’m going to replace that time with the Wall Street Yoga approach.

That also means I need to get back into the daily yoga routine, which I thoroughly enjoy when I’m doing it. And 10 minutes can be done. I can do 10 minutes after work before I go pick up my daughter from school. As desperate as I am to go pick her up because I miss her, she usually wants to keep playing with friends anyway.  Weekends will require a little finagling to get it in, but it can be done. Nobody should be in a place where they can’t carve out 15 minutes a day for themselves, especially when that (approximately) 15 minutes is scattered throughout the day!

Take a look at this book if you want to get into meditation and yoga for relaxation, especially if you’re like me and feel stretched for time and constantly “switched on.” It’s available on Amazon and as of this writing it’s only $5.99.

Also, I found the free app/website Calm. You can do short meditations using the timer in the app or on the website, it has lovely imagery and background noise to accompany, offers guided meditation AND has sessions as short as two minutes. So it fits right into this Wall Street Yoga paradigm.

Disclaimer: I was sent this book for free. Thoughts and opinions are all mine. There are Amazon affiliate links in this post, so there’s the off-chance that I may get $0.12 cents or something if you happen to take any action from those links.