Next up in our Soul People Series: meet Pooja Punjabi, one of our yoga teachers in India.
Words by Ed Templeton | 27th June ‘24
Pooja Punjabi
Pooja Punjabi
44
I am originally from Mumbai, but I am moving along the coastline spending months in Goa and Varkala.
The last 7 years I have been teaching yoga and helping out my mum with our food brand Ola Soul Food. It is a tiny brand with a big heart, where the food part is all my mum. I am a runner, doing delivery and packaging and I am the marketing person and I also produce content for Happily, a mental well being app.
When you see someone feel free, when you see someone navigating life better with some ease, when you see people managing their suffering, their disappointment, their expectations better, it is a win for me.
It is not about doing a headstand or getting 100 postures in your pocket, but the little things, like you are breathing better and can handle the mental / emotional spiral better with yoga practice.
People come to me because something is missing, some kind of emptiness, a void. Whether it is health, whether they want to lose weight, to sleep better, to love better or lift their child without snapping their back. It inspires me when practitioners put themselves out there to deepen their relationship with themselves. It is nothing short of magic.
Pooja teaching on our rooftop yoga shala in Varkala
There are things that will get you there to the now and then there is just being in the now.
How I get there is by living in nature, staring at the ocean, looking at a hill changing its colour throughout the day, staring at a tree, watching a bird doing its things, just messing around, clouds messing with my perception - these things bring me to the present.
If I don’t have any of these luxuries around me I just shut up - keep quiet, sit and watch my own brain doing its things which can be quite entertaining, but it is a hard life skill that requires practice. You have to constantly up the value of your attention.
I was born by the ocean in Bombay, back in the “dark ages” when there was no internet. I have lived close to the ocean all my life. If it's not an ocean, then it's a water body, which is large enough to be called an ocean. I think when you see something that big, that vast everything comes into perspective.
There's so much movement depending on the mood the Ocean is in. It can make you more humble. It can empower you.
It is so powerful when you are negotiating with water, sometimes it is friendly, mostly a struggle if I am surfing, but it brings me a lot of freedom. It teaches me so much about life. Trying to surf has been a mystical experience, to be part of a wave that decides to give you a good time on its way to the shore. It is extraordinary what it does for my heart & mind.
Water is a powerful medicine, it can heal trauma, hormonal imbalances, stored repressed emotions and there is exciting research coming out on saltwater even affecting the fascia.
The first time I experienced the washing machine effect while surfing, I felt like I was leaving my body, like a whirling dervish. It takes away the fear out of your body. You connect with something much larger than you without feeling small.
Pooja nailing the waves in Varkala
I travelled in Iceland as a vegetarian in a Campervan in 2006. Back then being vegetarian was unfathomable in some countries. Their diet is mostly meat. Should I judge them? Of course not. How ridiculous, what else do you want them to do in Iceland? They will eat what's available.
So that’s what travel does for you, essentially! It makes you see people living differently than you, that you might not even agree with, but it broadens your perspective, makes you more empathetic, it expands you. Once you expand it is not possible to go back to a narrow view on things.
The biggest lesson that I have learned is that deep down everyone is the same, the common thread of being a human is that we all want to feel loved.
I have never surfed outside of India, so as a start I would love to visit Sri Lanka.
Some books that have stayed with me are:
When it comes to music I listen to everything from Gustavo Santaolalla, Portishead, Radiohead, Otis Redding, The XX, Alanis, Lauryn Hill, Ben Harper, Mazzy Star, REM to The Grouper, Groove Armada, MannaDey & Kishore Kumar (Indian singers)
Music:
In the context of Hinduism and Buddhism, when I did my teacher training, we learned that the soul is constant, it changes form, it’s called transmigration. Soul does not have the polarity of right or wrong. The only questions are: Did you evolve? Did you learn and grow? Are you choosing love over fear?
You have no idea how radical that is because it takes all the pressure of you not having the need to be right all the time as you go about life decisions. Right and wrong comes from the ego. I am a yoga teacher, I am a woman, I am 44 years old and of Indian nationality.
All those identities come from a place of ego. It is transient. But the soul is not a woman nor a man, does not have an age, it's not brown, yellow, white or black. It just is. I think the job of the soul is to watch the journey of going back to where we came from. The more aware you are of getting stuck in the wrong and right, the more you can start looking at things from the perspective of ‘did I learn?’
I think Soul is also the art that moves you, the music that you groove to, it's the book that changed your life. Those are the qualities of my soul. And the sooner one is aware of the soul, the more brave you become, there's more courage. I kind of figured that it's what I will carry with me, time and again so it’s a good plan to work on the thing called Soul.
Pooja is hosting a 6 day slow movement retreat at Soul & Surf Kerala, from 14-19th September, 2024. Price per person from 425 GBP. For more information visit here.
