Hi. I’m Nupur Parik-Pandey and thanks for joining me on Straight From My Heart, an original from Motormouth Podcasts that’s your very own dose of poetry and honest conversations about everything under the sun. I aim to help you relax, find peace and forget about all your worries. Life’s far too short to be wasting time on things that don’t give you joy!

I hope you’ve been well and have been finding purpose in your day in this strange new normal that isn’t even all that new anymore. I think ever since the pandemic started and we realised that this is going to stick around for a while, slowly but surely, we’ve all pretty much adapted and survived as best as we possibly could. Our daily routines have definitely changed and we’ve become far more self reliant than we were before, right?

I’ve spoken to you about self-love and self-care before, but today, I want to talk to you about my relationship with yoga. Now here’s my disclaimer: I absolutely don’t claim to be a yoga expert, I only started practising in 2017, I don’t have washboard abs and I certainly can’t yet do a headstand on my own (but that’s a goal I’m working on). Despite these shortcomings of mine, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that Yoga came to me at a time in my life when I needed it most and it is what I turn to when my mind feels like a house on fire. They say that the teacher appears when the student is ready, don’t they?

So like any indian child, I attended those random occasional yoga lessons in school but you can’t expect to really “learn” this ancient practice when there’s one teacher, fifty students and just a half hour class. So up until 2017, I was under this really wrong impression that yoga is boring. I don’t know what changed and how the change really happened, but I found myself a great teacher that summer right before my grandfather’s passing. She taught me how to meditate, how to centre myself through right breathing techniques, how to stretch my muscles so they get stronger with each asana and so much more. And today, I’m a changed person. Yoga changed how I think and how I react to situations. Thanks to everything I’ve learnt over time through my practice, no matter how inconsistent it is, I know that I’m more zen in my approach to life than I would ever have been otherwise.

And on that note, let me share with you this little poem that came to my head bang in the middle of today’s round of surya namaskars, believe it or not! Stay tuned for it on the other side of this little break!

Welcome back to Straight From My Heart and here’s my poem, Predestined.

I will follow the currents-

And where they take me 

Is a story written 

Long long ago-

By stars,

By constellations,

By ancient mountains,

By old gods and goddesses,

By higher angels,

By the moons of Jupiter,

By powerful shrines,

By mysterious forests,

By tidal waves borne 

From the womb of the magnetic sea-

I surrender myself

To my fate

And I know it’ll take me 

To where my throne

Awaits…

That was the poem, and I hope you liked it. Could you sense how truly and honestly I actually do believe that everything will eventually work itself out because we all come with our own stories written by some divine being long before we came into existence? 

I know that sounds a bit heavy, right?

So let’s just move onto lighter things, like my life hack which I want to share with you to make your day easier, even if it’s by a small measure.

Sometimes, when I hit writer’s block- and boy that happens a lot!- and I’m feeling really unproductive and self-critical, I head to my kitchen and bake bread! You can find loads of great, easy recipes on the internet and you barely need 4-5 ingredients. The simple act of kneading the dough and just enjoying that gorgeous smell of freshly baked bread engulf your home is so relaxing, so therapeutic and it teaches you that patience can get you through the dullest of days. Give it a shot and write in to tell me if this life hack managed to pull you out of a rut.

With that we come to the end of today’s episode of Straight From My Heart with me, Nupur Parik-Pandey. Thanks for listening. You can follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook – our handle is @MotorMouthPods

Check out more episodes of this show and other MotorMouth Originals on our website – motormouthpods.com

You can find music and other credits in the episode notes.

This episode was written and hosted by me, Nupur.

Sound production, design and mixing by Prateek Sharma

Our Creative Director is Gargie Sharma

Executive produced and created by Prateek Sharma, for MotorMouth Podcasts.