The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh / Hyderabad News : Sudarshan Kriya: salve for the distressed

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Andhra Pradesh - Hyderabad

Sudarshan Kriya: salve for the distressed

Rhythmic breathing helps patients with end-stage kidney ailments feel relaxed

Patients witnessing perceptible change mentally
Positive frame of mind could help in treatment

— Photo: K. Ramesh Babu

Feel-good factor: Patients during a meditation session at Gandhi Hospital.

HYDERABAD: There’s still a lot to live for! Aiming to drill this belief in the patient’s inner self, nephrologists of the Gandhi Hospital have taken up a research on the impact of ‘Sudarshan Kriya’, a form of rhythmic breathing cognised by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar of Art of Living, on patients with end-stage kidney ailments, for whom dialysis is inevitable. Since a week, experts from Art of Living have been holding sessions for a group of patients who are on dialysis for survival. Such patients perennially live in a state of distress and their mind is always agitated, because they know the end is very near.

Going by the response of patients, the results are encouraging. They agree to witnessing a perceptible change mentally. “I am feeling very good about it. It’s helping me to relax and feel better from inside,” says Md. Abdul Khader.

“After every session, I feel free from inner burden. I am not sure whether I would be fully fit, but at the moment I am feeling good,” says another patient Rahmatunnisa Begum. “The breathing exercise helps me in relaxing me mentally. I am hypertensive and this session has helped me to control myself,” says a patient A. Mallayya. “Alleviating the mood and moulding them into positive frame of mind could help us in our treatment. We are conducting a battery of tests after the end of the first week to gauge any kind of change in patients,” says Head of the Department for Nephrology Gandhi Hospital Dr. Pradeep Deshpande

The sessions are being conducted by Anant Padmanabhan and Chitra Anant from Art of Living, who earlier trained victims of Tsunami at Nagapatnam. The training is a mild form of ‘Sudrashan Kriya’ because they can’t do vigorous ones due to hypertension and other complications.

Immunity

“It’s a rhythmic breathing process that allows a healthy and pleasant mind to produce chemical messengers, which work on the nervous system and in turn strengthen the immunity. We are looking to better their immunity and hopefully show some good results,” says Chitra Anant.

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