International Yoga Festival 2018 – where everyone connected, embraced, and evolved

The 29th annual week-long International Yoga Festival (IYF) is being held in Rishikesh’s Parmarth Niketan ashram. Uttarakhand Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat inaugurated the event on March 1. The official inauguration of the event saw participants showcasing beautiful costumes and cultural flairs of various races and regions.
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During this week, the IYF had been offering daily classes from 4 am until 9:30 pm along with more than 80 revered yogacharyas, experts, saints and presenters from around 20 countries from various parts of the world. Classes for mudras, reiki, spiritual discourses, meditation and Indian philosophy are being held in the ashram, which are hosted by spiritual leaders from both India and abroad.
In the due course of this week, around 200 sessions on topics such as Bharat yoga, Kundalini yoga, Raja yoga, Bhakti yoga, Ganga yoga, Somatics yoga, Iyengar yoga, Ashtana yoga were conducted in the ashram.


On the first day of the International Yoga Festival, Kundalini Sadhana led by Gurushabd Singh Khalsa from California, USA was held at 4 am at Parmarth Niketan, which was followed by pre-breakfast classes on Vinyasa Yoga with Akira Watamoto of Japan in the lead, Vinyasa Strength with Krishnamurthy Mohan Raj of China in the lead and Kundalini Yoga with Gloria Latham of Canada in the lead.

The organisers of the event also updated that apart from the Vice- President M Venkaiah Naidu, who inaugurated the festival on March 3, the Dalai Lama also graced it with his presence, and unveiled a statue of Lord Buddha in Parmarth Niketan premises.

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