Life after learning the "Art of Living"

My journey with Art of Living foundation started a couple of years back ,As usual like a immigrant worker from India in the USA i was under a lot of work related stress and on a routine physical i was detected with border line type 2 diabetes , a severe condition of Hypo hypothyroidism and some issues with my chlorestral . I was just 30 and this news shook me up . I had to change my lifestyle my food habits and had to learn some way to handle my stress. There i was contemplating to try out anything possible to take care of this condition.

Apparently I had done a meditation course back in the day it is called Vipassana and it was free , I did that course after coming out of college my basic pretense of doing that course was to test my self on complete abstinence rather than learning any meditation practices , its a 10 day in house course at a nearby Ashram and i completed it and came out of the course feeling good that i made it. That was all to it and never did anything for following up .

My wife did the SSY Sidhha Samadhi Yog course by Rishi Prabahakar when she was in school it was a course where they were taught to switch from a problem state to a no problem state, interestingly there was a guest teacher by name Sri Sri Ravi Shankar of Art of Living foundation and the guest teacher spent a day with all the students of that course. My wife always felt presence of divinity when she was around Guru Ji and she later went on to do a AOL part one course .

For some time after our marriage we use to be at logger heads on the topic of Mediation courses as she use to be from the "art of living" and i from Vipasanna, neither of us had been actively involved in these organizations .In my defense i was of a school of thought where these courses should not be paid and as this art was taught freely over generations in India there is no reason for Art of Living to charge exorbitant amount where as the Vipassana did not charge a single dime and at Vipassanna the entire 10 day course was free of charge , the students were asked to donate voluntarily . This diatribe went on for a couple of years me still standing against the commercialization of the free techniques taught from ages and my wife selling the idea that the foundation was doing big things with the money that was received from the courses from running camps in the prisons to helping out the third world countries with the basic necessities and i still remember making fun of her on all those issues.

So here i was with all my conditions and really scared in life wanting to deal with the health issues and again my wife was there trying to sell me the idea that i should go for a part one course but i was contemplating weather this will be beneficial or should i get back to vipassana . One thing was sure in my mind that i have to do something about the stress management and i knew from the bottom of my heart that all the issues were related to stress . I feel lucky that my prognosis was correct.(not that i did any kind of cross referencing or getting a second opinion)

So after a lot of thinking about spending the money or not , i finally decided that i will go ahead and do the course and as an person from Indian ethnicity i had some kind of faith in these traditional ways ...

2088 Walsh Ave , Santa Clara 6 PM i showed up for part one course there were a bunch of Indians there and all were eagerly waiting for the course to begin ....

5 days went by and it was the end of the course , trust me there was no enlightenment not that i was expecting any , thinking from my capitalistic hat on i was thinking that if everyone had to spend just 300 $ for getting enlightened it was an easy task to stop all the violence in the world.

It was a wonderful time all five days went by easily and thus i was inducted in the beautiful world of ART OF LIVING...

So everyone out there go and try out this art , we have been taught Math, Science ,Commerce but no one bothered to teach us the ART OF LIVING