June 29, 2015 Both people who are scared of flying and yoga enthusiasts will be happy to hear about a partnership with Indian budget airline SpiceJet and the Isha Foundation for Yoga which trained flight attendants from SpiceJet to perform some simple exercises to ease the mind and bodies of the passengers, and to release stress from travelling on long haul flights in increasingly cramped spaces.
Ajay Jasra, general manager of communications and corporate affairs at SpiceJet, gave the reasons for this, which was in addition to marking International yoga day this year:
“We have seen that while flying at a height of 35,000 feet, there is a pressure of 10,000 feet, and people generally have issues, travel related issues like numb feet or they have an issue related to the breathlessness. So our yoga instructor today, we have partnered with Isha Yoga today and they have instructed us and our crew who are going to tell our passengers how to cope with these travel related issues,”
Approximately 50 Isha instructors and SpiceJet crew members performed 10-minute sessions onboard selected long-haul flights across the network.
Vasundhara Rao of Isha Foundation gave instructions to the crew members and passengers as they performed light breathing exercises and mild head and shoulder movements.
“Sadhguru devised these practices so that anybody can do them in any mode of transport, be it on the flight, be it a train, be it in a car. Simple practices without disturbing the passenger next to you. You can do certain practices that we discussed today, that we learnt today and feel more energised, feel more relaxed, feel less tired,”
Most of the passengers loved it, like Ramesh Kumar Singh and Rubal loved it.
Ramesh Kumar Singh said “This is a very nice concept. SpiceJet had shown it on television and they have started it today. I did it today and it felt very nice,”
And Rubal added “Actually when you are up in the sky, like flying, your body gets very heavy and your ears get blocked, so when doing yoga you feel very relaxed when you’re doing that,”.
Airline officials said they hoped to do more of such classes during the oncoming monsoon season when the seat load is relatively low and more instructors can be accommodated on flights.