It doesn't matter if you are a yoga student or a teacher, but what really matters is that personal development occurs only when you practice effectively, learning from your mistakes as you go on. If you are already into teaching yoga and taking yoga classes, you yourself have seen the tremendous personal growth that you have experienced and have seen your abilities shift to an advanced level since the time you started with your basic foundational training.



However, students do have problems on a regular basis, and as they are in the early learning phase, it's easy to get sidetracked with the burden of their struggling life. You may give your best by investing time in the physical practice, but along with that, what's more important is focusing on your own emotional, mental and spiritual growth.

Let's see how we can continue with our personal growth during a period of a one whole week. Analyze yourself and try to find out if you are spending a lot of your time watching, reading or listening to bad, negative news. Although it's not really possible to totally avoid the rampant stories of terror, violence and crime, we can still filter out the horrible stories that come our way and sense the amount of bad media that we consume.

Many people out there are living a balanced life by choosing to listen something productive in their free time. By making out time to read helpful information, watch educational channels and listen to good educational CDs we heal our inner self by bringing more positivity in our lives. This does not mean that you should completely cut yourself out from the current events, but we do have the right to see and listen to how much we want when it comes bad news.

The human mind does have its own limits when absorbing bad information of any kind. This is very similar to working with your computer, where it stops working or slows down if a lot of harmful viruses get downloaded. In Yoga, we learn to gain control over the mind and clear it up.

This is definitely not good for all those who want to control us remotely. Hitler and Stalin build huge empires by controlling people in a remote way, through dogma, misinformation and propaganda. However, we still cannot go ahead and accuse the media for controlling the masses, but by going through enough of bad news can lead a person to become a pessimist.

Over the past few decades, the media has learned a great deal when it comes to news, and they know that people would rather pay for negative information. Therefore, the media gives a service that is in demand. However, it's not right for anyone to get manipulated into going through negative thinking.

Take out some time and listen to speakers, and how they try to motivate or even manipulate. Is the message they delivering of fear or of hope? How does the audience react to it and what vibes do they give? Unless and until we train and balance our mind, the external information will keep influencing each one of us.

After practicing meditation and yoga for years, an individual learns to find and seek the answers that lie within. This surely does not mean that yoga practitioners need to go into a hiding and get underground, but we should recognize our responsibility towards ourselves and not allow any message of anger, hate or intolerance influence our mind.