Breathing, yoga poses, relaxation prayers — Sushant Thyagaraj (12) has followed a similar yoga routine ever since he was five years old. The stressors may have shifted over time, but the process remains the same.

“Since I have the tendency to over-exaggerate situations and unnecessarily psych myself out, yoga is almost a grounding mechanism of sorts,” he said. “It keeps me from floating away into my own stratosphere of stress. For example, during the [science research] project I was getting really really psyched out one day; it was really hard to sleep in the night, so I decided to practice one of these relaxation techniques that I’ve been taught in my yoga instructors course. I decided to practice it for two to three weeks and just see where it would take me. It probably would not have been possible had I not pursued those relaxation techniques and I just continued down that downward spiral.”

Sushant originally began yoga through his long-standing connection with his culture.

“Since the roots of yoga are based in Indian culture, a lot of the values and principles that I learned in yoga class were also directly connected with what I learned in my Indian culture class,” he said. “In a way, they both overlap to a huge extent. I guess they all fall under the broader picture of how I’m connected to my culture. I would say [culture has] been a grounding factor for me since I haven’t known a time where I haven’t been involved with my culture in some shape or form. Basically, whenever I’m faced with certain decisions, I can always resort to my culture and the principles I’ve learned in order to make decisions and hopefully make the right decisions.”

Once an obligatory activity, yoga has morphed into a meaningful habit. Sushant’s training to become a yoga instructor changed him from a more introverted person to someone open to engaging with others.

“When I was younger, in sixth or seventh grade, I used to shy away from talking to other people even if they were even my own peers,” he said. “I would always be the kid who goes to school, just does his thing there, and comes home. It used to be a really regular cycle, and I used to be more comfortable with my own thoughts than talking to other people. But then all of a sudden when I took my yoga teacher training course to become this yoga teacher, that’s when I actually began interacting more with my peers, which eventually led me to break down that shell that was blocking me off from the rest of the world and talking with other people.”

Sushant has learned to take pride in his involvement in yoga.

“Sometimes I would be reluctant to tell people that I was a yoga teacher or tell people that I was a yoga practitioner because I would fear it would rub people the wrong way and they would get the wrong impression of me, but then as I grew up I began to realize none of that actually mattered, like what they thought of me or what they thought of what I did, and eventually I learned to be proud of who I was as a yoga teacher,” he said. “That stigma began to be erased from my mind slowly. Today, I don’t have any sense of that stigma that most teenagers, I think, associate with yoga, but then again, I think that stigma’s slowly going away.”

However, when words aren’t sufficient, he also turns to music to express himself. As a singer and member of jazz band, music has been a major aspect of his life.

“Music is a language basically for me to communicate to myself in, so there are things that you can’t express in words but you can express in music,” he said. “I’ve found that to be true a lot of times, like whenever I’m feeling a certain way, I listen to a certain genre of music, or I’ll go play something on the piano just because I can connect with a certain type of music at a certain different time. Whenever I’m in a certain mood that can’t always be described, then I will go to the piano, play a song that really sticks with me when I’m in that specific mood. There’s this interesting connection between me and music and how that can change based on my emotional temperature, my emotional state. I would say music and words are probably the best ways for me express myself.”

Jimmy Lin (12) recalled a memory with Sushant during Spanish National Honor Society’s cultural night.

“Sushant decided that he wanted to cover a song by Enrique Iglesias and he brought me and a bunch of other Spanish classmates to sing along with him and also be his backup dancers if we weren’t as comfortable with our vocal capabilities,” Jimmy said. “And just from our audition and the final performance, it was really spontaneous. Nothing was really formal, everything was really light hearted yet energetic and I think it really speaks to Sushant’s general attitude when he’s around people he cares about.”