Miss Mayers has just returned to Bermuda after six months travelling in Asia. Part of her time was spent living in an ashram in southeast India undergoing intensive yoga training. Now she is back in Bermuda and plans to start a career as a sivananda yoga instructor.Sivananda is a form of yoga that focuses on preserving health and wellness, with training that revolves around frequent relaxation and emphasises full, yogic breathing.“Before I left I was working in the corporate world and had a good job that I enjoyed,” said Miss Mayers. “But I wanted to do something more and help people. I didn’t know what the answer was, but I had the opportunity to travel. I felt like it was a good time for me in my life. The answer just came to me when I was at the yoga ashram: this is really something I could use to help people. My mind felt good, my body felt good.”However, she said it was a rough transition to sivananda yoga ashram life after the hustle and bustle of travel and modern living. When she first arrived in India, there were no taxis to take her to the ashram which was located way out in the countryside. She had to negotiate for a ride with a crowd of aggressive people.“India can be very overwhelming,” she said. “You have to have your wits about you and know what you are doing. At the ashram it was very hard at first, you don’t have your computer or cell phone. You don’t have any comforts, it is very simple and spartan.“We had a tough schedule. The bell goes at 5.30am. You get up and do chanting and meditation at 6am for an hour and a half. They give you tea and that is the highlight of the day for everyone. You do two hours of yoga. Then you have a vegetarian brunch at 10am. That is one of your only two meals of the day. After that you do volunteer work. After that you have lectures. They keep you going the whole day. Then you do a 4pm yoga class. You have dinner in silence on the floor. You eat with your hands. At 8pm you chant and meditate again and then you go to bed at 10pm. And you want to go to bed by that time.”She said by the second week her mind was calmer and everything had changed in her body. She had slowed down, and was breathing properly, having learned how to connect breathing with the mind. She lost weight on a daily diet of nuts, grains, legumes and curries, and she was sleeping better than she ever had.“One of the highlights was meeting people from all over the world,” she said. “There were 135 people in my yoga class from almost 135 different countries. Many people had never heard of Bermuda so it was fun showing them where it was on the map.”She found being at the ashram so beneficial that she decided she wanted to make yoga her life’s work. At the ashram she trained as a yoga instructor and now has more than 200 teaching hours recognised by Yoga Alliance under her belt. She has a lunchtime course arranged through the Lotus Studio which is part of the Bermuda Health-Co-op. It starts this month.“The idea of sivananda is to take some of what works for you and incorporate it into your own life and help other people to use that discipline,” she said. “With yoga you feel the benefits when you do it regularly. It is like the martial arts. You have to do it regularly and you have to practice. Being there really instilled that in me.“I think that a lot of people here have a lot of nervous tension and stress and they don’t know where to start. I found the yoga really helped.”She said one of the challenges for her was dealing with tight hamstrings brought on by running regularly. This made yoga positions like the plough, tough.“When you do the plough position you have to get your feet over your head and touching the floor,” she said. “If your feet can’t touch the floor you have to support your back. The first two weeks I was supporting my back, but now after practice I can get my feet all the way down. Some poses in yoga can take people a year to master. Everyone’s body has a different alignment, and history. You may have injuries or be an athlete. You have to be patient with yoga. There is no instant gratification with it. It has to be practised consistently. If you practice twice a day for a month or two you will find you can go down into the plough even if you are a runner with (tight) hamstrings. If you practice twice a day, morning and night, you will make progress.”Over the six months that she was abroad she spent much of it travelling with her sister, Arantxa Mayers. Together they visited Vietnam, Laos, China, Burma, Thailand and several other countries. While in some countries they took books and school supplies to children in remote rural villages.“We started out in Hanoi, Vietnam, in July and travelled through ten different countries in southeast Asia,” said Miss Mayers. “In Thailand, we got back onto the tourist trail in Chiang Mai and spent a day training to be a mahout, an elephant rider, on board Christina, a pregnant elephant with an obsession for sugar cane root. It was the dream of a lifetime to ride and bathe her, even if she was more interested in her food than us.“When we were travelling, there was so much culture and colour. The people are noisy, and have a completely different way of relating to each other than we do. It has been challenging being back in Bermuda, but I want to be here.“I missed my own bed, my family and friends and hearing the treefrogs chirping. Bermuda is beautiful. My sister is now teaching English in China. She decided she wanted to stay in Asia. We travelled together until I went to India. When I started out, it was in my plan to go to the ashram and see what it was like. I didn’t have any plan to teach yoga, but I just felt like the door opened for me when I was there.”For more about her journey see her blog at www.travelintwo.com. To contact her see her on Facebook under ‘Shanti Yoga’, telephone: 737-5114 or e-mail eloisamayers[AT]gmail.com