A VIP in the yoga world was in Cyprus recently for workshops, preaching ancient Indian wisdom with a constant smile
For a while, this article on Swami Jyothirmayah – and the three-day course he conducted at the Indian High Commission in Nicosia a couple of weeks ago – was lacking only one thing: Swami Jyothirmayah.
I finally catch him at the second attempt, and then only for about five minutes. He’s incessantly busy, both with the sessions (there’s also a course in Limassol, at the Island School) and online meetings, carrying out business for the Art of Living Foundation for which he works as a “senior disciple of His Holiness Sri Sri Ravishankar”, based in Germany but travelling constantly.
“This year, I think I travelled 260,000km,” he tells the assembled congregants as the course gets underway. “Village to village, town to town, country to country…”
He makes it sound like he’s going door-to-door – but the truth is a lot more glamorous. After Cyprus, for instance (he’s only here for a few days), he’s off to Strasbourg to address the European Parliament and “conduct a meditation there”; December 21 has been designated World Meditation Day and his mentor, Sri Sri Ravishankar, will be giving a keynote address at the UN. The Art of Living Foundation is a major force, with a presence in 180 countries. “More than half a billion people on the planet have benefited from various Art of Living programmes,” says the swami.
52-year-old Jyothirmayah – born in Kerala to a Catholic family – is a VIP in the specialised world of yoga, meditation and (especially) breathing. Hundreds throng to his courses all over Europe, I’m told by an awed volunteer at the High Commission, Cyprus being a rather small cog in this well-oiled machine. (The Art of Living seems to have a soft spot for our island; the revered Ravishankar himself also visited two years ago.) The events hall down the road from the Commission is chilly on a wet Monday evening, as a few of us – around 15 people, almost all women – wait for the course to begin.
The set-up is simple: five rows of yoga mats, plus a platform with a single plastic chair, draped with a yellow cover, which the guru takes for himself when he arrives. Before that, an Art of Living teacher leads the participants in warm-ups: rotating head, legs and ankles, shaking limbs, kicking out, stretching. And keep smiling, he instructs. “Throw away all your stress.”
There’s a hidden snare in those five words, and we may as well confront it right away. Our Western life, goes the cliché, is fraught and stressful. What we need are the secrets of the East, what the press release calls “ancient Indian wisdom” – the wisdom that’ll teach us to calm down, fill ourselves with energy and inner peace. We crave it, and of course we’re willing to pay for it; the course is priced at €80.

So what’s the deal? Is it fair to be cynical? Is the whole philosophy slightly dubious, preying on the wishful thinking of a harried, hollowed-out Western society?
“Well, you’ve always got to have an open mind,” says Marie Lord mildly when the question is put to her. “And I really believe that you should try everything once.
“Try it for yourself, with a good intention in your heart, and you might be pleasantly surprised!”
Marie, originally from Rotherham, is here from Peyia for all three evenings, staying in a hotel and exploring Nicosia between sessions. She’s newly retired from a career in property development in the UK – but has also been on a spiritual journey in the past 10 years, passing a healing exam and becoming a registered healer with the United Spiritual Fellowship in between running her company single-handed.
‘What are you expecting to find here?’ I ask on Day 1.
“Just the ability to stop your mind,” she replies. “And to breathe – and to focus just on the emptiness, and the space. And listen to your own heartbeat, and listen to your breath. And see where it takes you.”
How will I know if it’s working?
Well, she chuckles, “you’ll probably have a big smile on your face when you leave”.
Swami Jyothirmayah himself smiles constantly, a serene smile seemingly at odds with his busy life. “We have a mission,” he says when I finally pin him down, ‘we’ being Art of Living: “Stress-free, violence-free society”. His CV includes conducting programmes for prison inmates and rebels in conflict areas, teaching them techniques to find peace and turn their backs on violence.
Is his own personal life stress-free?
He contemplates the question for a few seconds. “I would say – honestly, I would say almost yes. I cannot say 100 per cent – but almost.”
How does he manage to stay grounded, travelling and working all the time?
“I practise Sudarshan kriya, the breathing technique. That will give you lots of energy.”
That answer, at least, is predictable, Sudarshan kriya – which descended on Sri Sri Ravishankar as a kind of epiphany after a 10-day period of silence in 1982 – being the jewel in the crown of the Art of Living philosophy. It’s a rhythmic breathing technique, part of a daily procedure that also includes pranayama – “breathing in a certain ratio of inhalations, holding the breath and exhaling,” according to a scientific study (!) by Polish academics in 2022 – and bhastrika, a cycle of very energetic, intense breaths.
Does it work? Absolutely, says Abhay Bhonge, an Indian gentleman who works for a shipmanagement company in Limassol but also volunteers at the course – and has spent 40 minutes every day for the past 20 years (he wakes up at 4am, which helps) using Sudarshan kriya for meditation.
“I don’t need drink, or cigarettes,” he assures me, “I don’t need to go to parties. I even don’t need holidays!” Breathing – the most basic, least appreciated aspect of human existence – is enough to keep him happy.
There are four main sources of energy, says the swami in his introduction. The first two are obvious: food and sleep. The fourth is meditation: 15 or 20 minutes of meditation are equivalent to nearly six hours of sleep, in terms of energy (needless to say, you can’t substitute one for the other). The third source is breathing, our lives being literally lived ‘between two breaths’: it’s our first action on entering the world, and our last before we exit.
“We are not breathing deep enough,” he laments, ladling out factoids. 80 per cent of impurities and toxins are cleansed by the body through the breath, many times more than through sweat or urine. Most people use a mere 30-35 per cent of their lung capacity – a point repeated by Abhay, who illustrates how his morning routine includes breathing with his arms behind his neck, to activate the top part of the lungs which otherwise goes unexploited.
Alas, my own experiment in breathing ends ingloriously.
I stick around for a couple of hours on Day 1, till Swami Jyothirmayah and the teachers start instructing us in ujjayi breathing, the first stage of the process. Think of drinking a cool glass of water on a hot day, we’re told. Think of the sound you make afterwards, that satisfied ‘Aaaah!’. “And now, can you make this sound with the mouth closed?”
The idea is “a slight contraction of the muscles of the larynx and partial closure of the glottis,” to quote those Polish academics again. (Their study, by the way, showed “a statistically significant increase in the sense of coherence of practitioners”.) Volunteers approach each person, craning to hear if the sound is taking place in their larynx. Alas, my own larynx finds the whole thing too complicated.
Partly, it’s because it’s new. The course is open to everyone, but most of the others seem a lot more experienced. (Another person I talk to, Elena Hari – originally from Romania, now in Larnaca – is, like Marie, a qualified healer.) Mostly, however, it’s because I’m trying to take notes and observe my neighbours at the same time as breathing – and that’s never going to work.
You must “give 100 per cent,” cautioned the swami earlier – and that’s actually a huge part of the process. It’s not merely a technique, in the simple mechanical sense. It’s a state of mind. It’s a question – like so much in life – of being there, “in the present moment”.

At one point, participants are asked to introduce themselves to those around them; later, Swami Jyothirmayah asks if they recall the names of the people they just spoke to – and seems unsurprised to learn that some have forgotten. It’s because “the mind is not fully there,” he explains. You’re already thinking of the next person – just as we’re forever thinking of the future or the past, stuck in memory or anticipation. “This chattering mind, all the time thinking, thinking, thinking. Then what happens? This consumes energy. You become tired.”
That, in the end, is the crux of the wisdom: in a word, focus. Breathing is focus, meditation is focus. Living in the moment is focus. Kids do everything 100 per cent, he notes approvingly. They breathe deeply, properly, plunge into the moment and smile 400 times a day (“We forget [that] our nature is joy,” says the smiling swami). Unable to focus, I slink away on Day 1 – and return just before the start of the final session, catching up with Marie and the others.
There was yoga, she tells me. There was communal breathing. There was also community – becoming friends, talking about their experiences.
The breathing opened her mind, almost drug-like. “I actually saw a lovely colour – and, in the deep meditation I had, I just wanted to smile. It was kind of bizarre, really. I’m glad I was laid down,” she adds with a chuckle, “so that nobody could see, but… I just felt all this joy!”
What to make of this whole experience? Just a scam, cynics might say, a chimera. Focusing on breathing is all very well in a yoga room, surrounded by like-minded people – but could it ever help in the real, stressful world, in an argument or road-rage incident, faced by an angry stranger yelling at you?
“You’ve got to understand that they are angry. You are not,” says Marie simply – and indeed, testing out this knowledge in the wild (so to speak) is part of the process. “We spread the word,” says Elena, the Romanian healer, also bemoaning how few Cypriots seem open to the stress-free philosophy:
“They have to learn. It needs education here – they don’t know! It’s more easy to go for a coffee or souvlaki, instead of coming to learn to breathe.”
It’s a life skill, adds Marie. It’s a hack, it’s ammunition. “It just gives you that kind of oom-pah-pah to think, ‘Y’know, I can do this – and life’s really good’… All the obstacles we have – emotional, or business like I’ve had – they don’t last forever.”
True enough – though of course they’re inevitable. Breathing, and focus, and joy don’t remove all those obstacles. Life is life, that goes without saying; it’s the ‘Art of Living’, not the ‘Magic Trick of Making Life Disappear’. But it helps, or perhaps it can do. “If you can manage your mind well,” Swami Jyothirmayah tells the class, “you can manage your life very well.” That chattering mind, forever thinking and thinking.
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