By Gurudevi Nirmalananda

The millennia-old yogic tradition is based on yogis helping yogis.

While Western yoga is focused mainly on entry-level practices (poses, breathing practices and devotional chanting), there is help available every step of the way.

Even if you’re doing it yourself by working through a website, yoga book or our Pose Cards, you’re getting a boost from the author. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

As your yoga progresses into the subtleties, into the more powerful realms of inner exploration, the help you get also becomes more subtle and more powerful.  Yoga calls this “Grace,” defined as the power of revelation. 

Your process of interiorization moves through stages of contemplation and meditation, culminating in profound and deep experiences of inner absorption (samadhi).

As a practitioner of Svaroopa^® yoga’s spinal release poses, you already know the early levels of samadhi.  You experience them so easily in the seated poses and twists, and especially in your many Shavasanas.

To excavate more deeply, all the way to your inner Divinity, you have to sit up.

All your spinal release work has prepared you for an easy seated pose, so the meditative energy, named Kundalini, can climb your spine.

Yo’vipastho j~nahetushcha. — Shiva Sutras 3.29

Only a yogi with mastery over the shakti-chakra is capable to enlighten others.

This sutra says there are yogis who are capable of giving enlightenment to others. What an amazing gift that is! Personally, this is what got me into yoga and has kept me so focused for so long. Having met such a yogi, my own Guru, I knew I was being given a gift beyond compare ― Grace.

Excerpt from Yoga: Embodied Spirituality, pages 30–32