NY City ballerina to lead yoga day event in presence of Modi today

Richmond says she will lead the yoga session for about 25 minutes at the outdoor area of the UN Headquarters, adjoining a riverfront, where Modi will also be present.

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Annelies Richmond teaches yoga at more than 108 universities across America.

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Back in 1999, Annelies Richmond was a 23-year-old professional ballerina, been in the profession for eight years, and suffering all that it entailed — physical injuries, stage fright and anxiety attacks. “The night before each performance would be a night of anxiety, I would toss and turn, worried about my performance the next day, despite the injuries that hours of practice brings in,” she tells The Indian Express over the phone from New York City, where she would be leading the International Yoga Day celebrations from the United Nations Headquarters, along with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

“It is a great honour for me to be leading the Yoga session for PM Modi,” says Richmond, who now teaches yoga at more than 108 universities across America, including Harvard, Stanford and Columbia. “Stress and mental-health issues are the same for students in any part of the world,” she says, adding, “It’s natural because there is a lot of pressure on them to excel and a lot is at stake. But we have seen that yoga and meditation help them.”

Interestingly, the university programmes in yoga that she leads are called Sky Breath Meditation, a name given to the ‘sudarshan kriya’ practice when she learnt it first around two decades ago. ‘Sudarshan kriya’ yoga is a type of cyclical controlled breathing practice that provides relief from depression, and is taught by the Bangalore-based Art of Living (AOL) Foundation.

Richmond says she will lead the yoga session for about 25 minutes at the outdoor area of the UN Headquarters, adjoining a riverfront, where Modi will also be present. “I will be heading a group of six American children – in the age-group of 8-12 years – who have been practising ‘asanas’,” she explains.

Her own exposure to yoga first happened at the age of 18, when she believed it was merely about stretching and didn’t like it much. But again at 23, Richmond says, when she came in contact with an AOL teacher in NYC that she gradually started to believe in it. “While ‘asanas’ were helping me in physical healing, from my injuries and stiffness, it was the ‘pranayama’ and the ‘sudarshan kriya’ that helped me get over the anxiety and depression that came with my profession,” Richmond says.

“These practices can take away all our life problems,” she remarks.

Her first trip to India happened in 2006, when she came to Bangalore for a few months to learn yoga at the AOL campus, which she followed with some months of training in Rishikesh. Richmond has been visiting India every other year since then, to update and brush up her practice, and plans another trip later this year.