Founder’s Message

Malaysian Yoga Society – Transcending Boundaries

Seek youthful technology and you get excited….
Seek aged wisdom and you get calmness….
Seek both and you find balance in the modern world.

“Seek youthful technology and you get excited. Seek aged wisdom and you get calmness. Seek both and you find balance in the modern world.”

The Malaysian Yoga Society (MYS) was formally established as a mental and physical health-oriented humanitarian organisation in November 2004 with the intention of bringing yoga to all — primarily the impoverished, unfortunate and underprivileged members of the society.

Yoga is a practical art, easy to learn and has embedded in it the elements of total wellness of a person. Those who practice it in the correct manner — diligently and with clarity — will see concrete results, and experience significant inner and outer transformation.

We believe in sharing this wonderful gift of yoga with people from all layers of the society and make it available to those who have no access to the mainstream yoga classes. Those who are socially or economically disadvantaged should not be refused the benefits of yoga and we hope to reach out unconditionally to the abused women, single mothers, children from homes or orphanages, the poor and the needy.

Yoga will increase their inner strength and uplift their lives in more ways than one. It will give them the internal physiological and emotional balance they need in order to progressively grow in many ways.

In this direction, we have trained over 400 instructors via our ‘Learn to Teach, Teach to Learn’ programme since 2010. Under a meticulously compiled training programme based on a complete yoga curriculum and comprehensive teaching methods, the participants are provided with the basic skills of teaching yoga for beginners. It’s a 6-day programme that has been running very successfully for the past few years.

To further boost the participants’ confidence to grow as credible yoga instructors, certificates are provided to each and everyone who qualifies. They are also given ample access to all our other programmes to give them opportunities to progress further in the field.

NGOs and volunteers who also take part in the programme, which is equivalent to the Level 1 International Yoga Instructor Course run by the Malaysian Association of the Yoga Instructors, are encouraged to spread the knowledge of yoga to others, especially the primary and secondary school students.

Through this programme and our other core activities like the annual Food Fair, the Malaysian International Yoga Competition, Yoga Camps for students, teaching yoga in schools and teaching yoga to the prisoners, we target to spread the richness of yoga to all and sundry regardless of race, religion, gender or financial standing.

Yoga is known as a science and all sciences bring experience through experiment, and in this case, through practice. There are two components in this science; one is internal evolution and the other is the evolution of the society. Through practice both will evolve.

Internally, we need strength and vitality to live this highly stressed and challenging life, externally we need to find the oneness in society. Yoga means union of body, breath and mind; the other aspect is union with all members of society to bring about unity and evolution. The process of bringing about this change follows the laws of nature as well as the laws of humanity.

At a much deeper level, yoga is a dynamic form of inner engineering and a powerful transformative force that will create great harmony amongst the members of the community. With this end in mind, we continuously embark on projects which will improve our lives collectively — as one unit of a unified society. We organise group activities such as large-scale group physical yoga exercises, community projects and gatherings that are harmonious in nature, to promote external harmony which can be shared by everyone.

With this, we hope all will continue to support these projects and be a part of our continued effort to contribute back to the society. Thank you.

– Manisekaran, Founder of Malaysian Yoga Society