By Swami Nirmalananda

As a teenager, I often complained that this didn’t seem to be a free country.  If I was free, I should be able to go where I wanted, when I wanted, and do and say what I wanted.  My mother, who carefully controlled all of those things, responded that was not the meaning of freedom.  I didn’t understand her nor what I had learned in school about freedom in America.

Then I lived in Madrid during the time the Spaniards regained their freedom.  I was helping with opening a yoga center, living and working with Madrileños.  I particularly loved my daily commute by bus, surrounded by chatter in a language I could partly understand, driving through beautiful plazas with huge, incredible fountains.  Preparing for their first election in 40 years, every day featured huge political rallies that lasted until the madrugada, the wee hours of the morning.  In addition to the political fervor that I recognized from American elections, there was an added element of infectious joy.  They were so incredibly happy to regain the right to vote.

I began to question my idea of freedom.  I had leapt from many years of schooling in American history to many years of training in yoga philosophy, so different from each other.  Yet they both spoke movingly of freedom.  I knew that I still didn’t understand freedom.  It took more yoga and meditation to make it clear.

Yoga’s goal is described as “freedom” or “liberation.”  You get a taste of yoga’s freedom in every yoga class.  In Svaroopa^® yoga, it might happen to you after Seated Side Stretch, when your inner opening is not merely physical.  Maybe you love JP (Jathara Parivrttanasana — Rotated Stomach Pose), precisely because it seduces you into an irresistible inner depth.  It could happen in a backbend, when the pose stops being such a struggle and you feel like you could lift off and fly.  Or maybe a seated forward bend that makes you melt into something bigger than the universe.  One of the most reliable places to find it is in Shavasana, especially the closing Shavasana at the end of class.  The whole class is a warm-up for the final Shavasana, so you can experience the freedom at the deepest level of your own existence.  Mukti – Freedom.

The practices of yoga provide immediate results, which is very important in our hurry-up-must-get-it-now lifestyle.  Even your first class makes you feel better than you imagined possible.  In the beginning, it appears that the purpose of the class is to fix your body.  Familiar pains disappear or are profoundly diminished, and you enjoy a new feeling of profound relaxation and ease.  Most amazingly, you feel both relaxed and energized at the same time, a rare combination!  The freedom of comfort and ease in your body is a great freedom, but the yoga’s promise doesn’t end with this first blush of success.

In addition to this feeling in your body, you experience an inner feeling of peace, which happens in your very first class.  You feel undeniably calmer on the inside.  In the same way that the physical benefits develop further as you continue, this inner sense of peace develops progressively into stithi, an inner stability that supports you in all places and times.  This yoga-feeling is inside you, supporting you wherever you go.  This is more than just the physical feeling of freedom; it is freedom from the inner turbulence that most people live in all of the time.  Yet, the promise of yoga is not limited to this level of freedom.

Most yogis who continue classes for more than a year become interested in the rest of the science of yoga.  The breadth and depth of the authentic yoga tradition is little known in the West.  The decompressions of your spine in Svaroopa^® yoga is especially effective in preparing you for the next level of inner exploration.  The inner layers of obscuration fall away at a faster rate as you delve into yoga’s subtle techniques for the heart and mind.  Inner constrictions dissolve into expansiveness when you use yoga’s powerful meditative techniques, which are distinctly different from other types of meditation.

Freedom is the only word for what you discover inside.  Layer by layer, there is a lightening of your internal load.  There are stages of this, and you might be surprised to recognize how many of them are working in you already:

1. The internal chatter becomes less constant.  Though your mind continues to be quite active, it drops down from the familiar 100% of the time.  You enjoy many sweet moments of inner quietude, which continue to increase in proportion to the diligence of your yoga practice.  Freedom from the noisy mind.
2. The content of your mind becomes less toxic.  Your mind is surprisingly less negative about yourself as well as others.  Freedom from negativity.
3. You begin to prefer “quiet mind” to “busy mind.” The things your mind used to do become less interesting to you, while your sense of self depends less and less on the constant “doing.”  Freedom to “be” instead of always having to “do.”
4. Your personality starts to lighten up.  You both laugh more freely and cry more easily.  This is a freedom from having to be who you think you are, as you become more spontaneous and responsive to everything in life.  Freedom to participate fully.
5. Your improved physical flexibility is an indicator of your increasing adaptability, as you become less dependent on having everything go your way.  You can go with the flow, and even find beauty and meaning in things you had previously resisted.  You embrace the whole of life, regardless of the form it takes.  Freedom to embrace life.
6. You feel less anxiety and fear.  You worry less because you know that, if you should fall, you will bounce instead of break.  Like a cat, you always land right side up, so there is nothing to worry about.  Freedom from fear.
7. You become more generous.  You can give of your time and other resources without feeling so miserly.  That pinched miserly feeling used to arise from fear, and it is receding into a distant memory.  Freedom to give.
8. Inner impulses of love arise and overwhelm you without warning.  This feeling is not limited to family members and pets anymore; anyone and anything can trigger this ecstatic inner arising.  The iron bars around your heart begin to melt in the increasing fire of your inner knowing and being.  Freedom to love.
9. You continue to expand into inner spaciousness, which extends inward to include the whole world within your being.  Your love for others is a feeling of recognition of your own Self in All.  Ultimate freedom.

OK, I confess that I simplified it a little bit.  There are probably a few more stages in the process.  Also, when you experience a new stage of it opening up for you, you might be in and out of it a few times before you attain stithi, steadiness at that level.  But is happening to you already.  It is inexorable, unstoppable, totally reliable.  It is you — becoming more You.  All you have to do is more yoga…

Originally published July 2004

By Swami Nirmalananda

When you lie in yoga’s Shavasana, your whole body gets to deeply relax.  More than mere relaxation (as good as that is), each time you do Shavasana you are developing your ability to release multiple layers of tension from both your body and your mind.  Your body and mind both enjoy a profound sense of ease, with an inner spaciousness that you are meant to be living in all the time.

Unfortunately, when you get up and get moving again, you are still able to recreate the too-familiar tensions again.  You go back to life, and begin to tighten up.  We call this “relapse;” you are going back to how you felt before.  Instead of living in the inner spaciousness of your own Beingness, you end up living in relapse.

How can you carry the inner openness of yoga into daily life?  To answer this, you must understand the mystery of the human body.

There are many ways to work with your body in the yoga world, as well as in athletics and different forms of exercise.  Svaroopa^® yoga works with your body in a very different way because we understand your body to be something different.  Instead of treating your body:

• like a performance machine — that can be fine-tuned and improved,
• like an artist’s canvas — that can be made more beautiful and more able to express the art and grace of the human form,
• like a yardstick — that can be used to measure your beauty, your attractiveness to someone else, or your individual personal value or worth,
• like a hunk of meat — that has to be dragged around with you and is always threatening to pull you down into the mundane world, or threatening to look bad or smell bad or create some problem for you…

Svaroopa^® yoga sees your body as Divine, an individualized expression of the One in a physical form.  Consciousness alone has become everything that exists, including your body and mind.  The One Reality which has always existed, yoga calls Shiva.  Shiva decided to move, to dance, to play at being many — becoming you and I, and everything that exists.  That movement is called Shakti.  Shakti is moving Shiva, and is the energy that becomes the atoms.  Atoms manifest into everything that exists, including your own body.  Your body is a physical expression of the One.

This is the mystery of the human body.  You can delve into your body and open up what is contained within it, like you open up a Christmas present.  In Svaroopa^® yoga, the body itself is your field of inquiry.  More than merely discovering muscles and bones, this inner inquiry opens to progressively deeper levels of the inner dimensions of your own being.

Your mind is made of the same Shakti that becomes the atoms, but your mind exists at a less dense level of contraction.  Your body and your mind are not two separate things that are in relationship with one another.  Your body and your mind are both outward expressions of only one thing — you.  They are two different levels of the blossoming of consciousness into a unique and individual manifestation — you.  Consciousness becomes you by shaping your mind into its tangible form on the subtle level, and then further condenses into the physical level as your body.  Your body is the outward expression of your mind.  Anything you do with one affects the other.

This means that you can think yourself into relapse.  Whether you do 20 minutes of yoga or devote a full weekend or week to it, you can tighten right back up with just a few minutes of worry.  Your body responds to every thought as though you were living through the experience.  If you think about walking down a dark alley at night, your body goes through the physical experience as though you were really there — your tailbone tightens, your breath shortens and the adrenaline pumps into your cells.  If you use your mind to run reruns of the worst experiences of your life, your body relives it every time you think it.  You can even have physical experiences of things that have never happened if you merely project that your future will be full of your worst fears.

While we work with your body, the purpose is to change the way your mind works.  The ancient teachings of yoga clearly state that the purpose is to work on your mind.  We work with your body because it is so easy to change your body.  Most of your aches and pains go away within four or five Svaroopa^® yoga poses.  At the most, it takes a few classes and Embodyment^® sessions.  The good news is that there is no reason for you to live in chronic pain and tension.  Feeling better is just a few minutes away.  And feeling better has an effect on your mind.

But if you don’t work with your mind directly, then you reinstate the prior problems with every thought.  The only way to stay out of relapse is to begin the process of quieting your mind.  Once you experience a quiet mind, you will always want to have a quiet mind.  This inner quietude frees you from the extraneous internal chatter and makes you more effective at everything you do.  At the same time, your quiet mind becomes an avenue that you can use to look more deeply inward — to find your Self, which is consciousness-itself.

First published June 2004

By Swami Nirmalananda

It feels so wonderful — lying on your back in that wonderfully padded, well-supported deep relaxation, with someone guiding you through the process of becoming aware of your body.  “Sha-vaa-sa-na,” even the word is such a beautiful sound.

Well described as yoga’s Relaxation Pose, Shavasana is a profound yoga practice that is especially important to those living our crazy modern lifestyle.  The frenetic pace and the pressures create a residue of exhaustion that you carry around with you, called shrama in Sanskrit.  When you first discover Shavasana, it provides you with a deeply restful relaxation.  If that were the only thing that Shavasana offered, it would reason to do it every day for the rest of your life!  Yet it offers much more.

For a new student, Shavasana is one of the hardest things we ask you to do.  You arrive at your first class and have to take off your shoes, which is strange enough.  Then your teacher has you lie down on the floor.  If there are others already lying down, it is a little easier.  But if you came a little early so you could get oriented, you may be the first one to lie down.  As your teacher props your knees up on the blanket rolls and adjusts you into the pose, you discover a whole new level of comfort and ease.  You probably don’t even notice that other people are walking around you while they get themselves set up in a similar way.

If you have done other styles of yoga, you have done Shavasana without any blanket rolls under your knees.  It is still a wonderful pose.  In Svaroopa^® yoga, we use the props in order to provide support to the tight areas in your body.  With support, you always get a deeper release.  Shavasana provides a relaxation that seeps into your core.  The blanket rolls are not there to support your legs; we lift your knees in order to support your spine, specifically to lower the vertebrae at the back of your waist onto the floor.  You may also need a little cushion under your head in order to level your forehead and chin.  This does two things for you: (1) it takes pressure off your neck; and (2) it quiets your mind.  When your head is tipped, your mind continues to race.

You may think that Shavasana is chance for a nice nap, but what you are experiencing is not sleep.  Though in the beginning you may hear every word of the Guided Awareness, that soon changes.  As your teacher starts, beginning at your toes, there is a point where you stop hearing her/him.  Then, when the Guided Awareness ends, you begin moving when your teacher describes the next pose.  Where were you?  You didn’t hear all the words, and you thought you were asleep, but you were able to move when your teacher said to do so.

The whole purpose of Shavasana is to open the doorway to the inner dimensions of your own being.  Because of shrama, the collected fatigue, your experience of Shavasana is like a nap — in the beginning.  Still, it is not sleep.  As you develop your yoga practice, you become able to discern the difference between sleep and this deep inner rest.  In Shavasana, the restful state is less heavy than sleep.  Afterward you feel more profoundly refreshed than after a full night of sleep.  It is called yoga nidra, a yogic state of deep rest, and may even deepen into tandraloka, an immersion into the inner realm of Consciousness-Itself.

If your mind is active when you first lie down, the process of becoming progressively aware of each area of your body will calm and settle your mind.  This is an interweaving, like the threads on a loom, that brings your mind back into your body.  Too much of the time, your mind is fragmented into small bits, scattered all over the cosmos.  Weaving your mind back into your body is very good for your mind, and it is very good for your body.  Your body feels abandoned when your mind is elsewhere.  You have so many creative ways to be somewhere else.  You can be thinking about a place or a person.  Or you can be reviewing the past, often accompanied by regrets or recriminations.  Often, you are projecting into the future with desires or worries.  When your mind is elsewhere, you are actually gone; your body notices.  A body with no one in it is called a corpse.  In fact, Shavasana is a Sanskrit word meaning “Corpse Pose. ‘

There is a difference between your body and the corpse that it will one day be — there is someone living in it.  The Guided Awareness brings you back into your own body and your body comes alive again.  You may even feel the enlivening it as it happens, tingles of aliveness wherever your awareness is directed to, or maybe a growing warmth or a feeling of coolness.  Some areas of your body are hard for you to be aware of because they are tight and dense, like that proverbial corpse.  Shavasana alone may not be enough to re-enliven these areas.  All of the other asanas (poses) help unravel the deep tensions that limit your ability to be fully alive and fully embodied.  Shavasana is the mother of all the other asanas.  They all arise out of Shavasana and they all lead you back to Shavasana; they all prepare you to discover what Shavasana really offers.

Shavasana is the first pose you learn, yet it is the last one you master.  Every class begins with it, so it is your first yoga pose.  Every class begins and ends with Shavasana because it is such an important pose.  Stages of mastery unfold as you become more embodied and more able to be aware:

1. Relaxation — even if your mind was still active at the beginning, at the end you feel more peaceful and your body is more relaxed.  This may be a new feeling!
2. Sleep —“Are you sure that I wasn’t sleeping?”  If your head turns to the side, you may have actually gone to sleep, but otherwise it is yoga nidra or tandraloka.
3. Meditation — though you get more out of meditation in a seated pose, sometimes Shavasana propels you past your mind into the vast inner recesses of your own Being.  How wonderful!
4. Embodied Consciousness —  the interwoven reality, your body is a physical expression of the One Reality, which you discover within as your own divine Self.

Shavasana.  I come back to the word itself.  It is such a beautiful word — the sounds in it are so smooth and soft.  Its name conveys a promise — to experience it, all you have to do is more yoga.

Original published April 2004

By Swami Nirmalananda

Vitally alive!  A body that is breathing and pulsating with aliveness in every cell.  Eyes clear and radiant.  Glowing with a happiness that arises from an inner surety of being.  Yoga makes you alive — fully alive.  You have the capacity to live this way in every moment, and some work to do in order to get there.  Too many people settle for less and walk around half-dead.

Can you really be fully alive in every moment?  There are so many parts of the day that are difficult.  Maybe you have a long commute in traffic every day.  Put on some rousing music and sing along at the top of your lungs.  Perhaps your challenge is at work:  it is simply a dead-end job.  Pour yourself into it and give it your best in every moment.  Even if nothing changes on the outside, you will feel better for having put yourself forth fully.

Is it possible to be fully alive in every moment of your life?  Even when times are difficult?  If you are going through difficult things at home, open your heart even more.  Love the people in your life even more!  Even if you are facing the imminent death of someone you love, you can decide to celebrate their life with them.  Say all the thank yous and remember all the times you have shared.  Allow yourself to feel the joys and the pains all over again.  Walk into grief with your eyes wide open, even when they are full of tears.  Live!  Allow yourself to feel, regardless of what is going on.

In the practice of Svaroopa^® yoga, we use customized poses to open your spine.  This releases the deepest layers of tension for the purpose of freeing your body from what makes it less alive.  As you open up space in your spine, your internal organs are no longer subject to compression and begin to work better.  Your nervous system, immune system, respiration and circulation all improve.  Additionally, your mind and emotions become progressively more clear; you are able to live in the moment and carry less baggage from the past.  The joy and love that is inherent in your being can rise from the Inner Source and spread into your life and the world, while your sense of self continues to deepen.  All this makes you more and more alive — more and more fully alive.  You can participate in every moment of life fully, even if it isn’t what you thought it would be.

Yoga describes the purpose of human life as being two-fold.  If you had a sense that you came here in order to accomplish one overarching purpose, you are actually half right.  There are two things that you are here to accomplish.  The first is to have experiences, a full range of experiences.  This means that life is not merely about happiness and ease.  The experiences of life include sadness and challenge.  You are meant to be as present for grief and loneliness as for the times of celebration and community.  Allow yourself to experience it all — fully.

The second purpose of life is Self-Realization.  Whether you have embraced this as a goal or not, working on this is what makes the other purpose of life happen.  If you don’t look at your own potential for realization, the first purpose of having experiences doesn’t work out for you.  This is because, when you don’t know of your own inner essence, the outer things become the most important things in life.  Your first purpose, to have experiences, becomes your only purpose.

Thus, if things are going badly today — you are having a bad day, or (worse) you are a bad person.  If things are going well — you are a good person, having a good day.  When you don’t look at your own inner essence, your whole sense of self is created by where you are, what you are doing and how it is going, not to mention what other people think or say about you.

When you have painful experiences, you don’t want to feel the pain, so you tune it out.  You shut down on the inside, so that you don’t fully experience what is happening.  This process of shutting down is one of creating physical tension.  Your ability to feel the physical sensations of your body actually diminishes as you try to not feel what you are experiencing in your mind and emotions.  Sometimes this is a valuable decision —especially as a child, your ability to shut out the painful stuff might be what got you through a tough time.  Even if that was what you needed to do sometime in the past — that was the past.  Your ability to look life fully in the face and to move into it with vigor is based on your current stature as an adult, and as a yogi.

A yogi does not shrink from anything.  A yogi does not label anyone or anything as being good or bad — everything and everyone is a form of Shiva, the one Divine Essence manifest in all forms.  As a yogi, you can (and must) choose where you are going to spend your time and with whom, but without having to shut yourself down or tune out your experiences.  This means you can watch the evening news without being upset by it.  You can have an experience of knowing and seeing the pain and injustice in the world, without going into pain yourself.  And, even if it does bring up the feeling of personal pain, you can embrace it.  It is only temporary — all experiences are temporary.  They all change with time.  Just keep tuned in.  The show is ever changing.

As you continue the process of inner opening, you discover a deeper and greater sense of self.  Then the stuff of life doesn’t slay you.  Things come and go while you fit it into a larger perspective.  The ups and downs of life become less all-possessing because you have a larger sense of self.  It is not threatened by the momentary losses and it is not lost in the neon light of success.  If you make a mistake today, you have a sense that there is a tomorrow coming in which you can try to rectify it.  If you enjoy a great success today, you know that there will be something tomorrow that will humble you again, and you enjoy that too.  Your inner sense of self is large enough to accommodate the ever-changing world along with other people’s opinions of you.

When something in your life becomes so overwhelming that you get lost in it, then the problem is not the thing that overwhelmed you — the problem is that you lost your Self.  Your own inner source of resiliency, joy and love is lost.  This is the very source that will make you able to handle all the things that life brings, but you lost track of it.  This loss of Self is the biggest catastrophe of life — and you see it everywhere you look, in the media, the movies and TV shows, and in everyone you know.  As a yogi, you need and want something more.  You must!

In yoga, you work on the two purposes of life simultaneously.  If you tried to leave your life to work on Self-Realization, then you would have lost track of one of the purposes.  The archetype of the yogi, sitting in a cave meditating by himself is an archetype — not reality.  Yogis in India live in community, sharing the process and working together toward that ultimate aim.  Along the way, they have many experiences — of relationship, of a shared goal and the work that needs to be done, of celebrations of joy and love for one another, etc.

In other words, yogis have a life.  So do you.  You must work on both purposes of life simultaneously.  You can begin by fully embracing your life.  Step into it as though you chose to be alive.  Participate fully, while you are living from the inner depths of your essence, or looking for it — inside.

Do More Yoga!

Originally published in March 2004

By Swami Nirmalananda

The texts of yoga define love as the recognition of Self in another.  You know that feeling when you look at someone and see something in them; maybe it’s the light shining through their eyes.  An extraordinary feeling arises inside.  What is happening is that you have seen the infinite within them, and it triggered your experience of the infinite within you.  The inner arising is the infinite filling you from the inside — the infinite meeting the infinite.  It is called Love.  I would wish that it happens to you frequently or that you live in it all the time.

Unfortunately, you limit how often you allow that feeling to be triggered inside.  You even limit how many people you allow yourself to feel this with.  Your list is too short.  Somehow, it is easier when a pet or a beautiful scene in nature triggers it.  It is a little harder with a person because we attach lots of other things onto this feeling.  When you say, “I love you,” it ends up with some baggage:  you have unexpressed expectations that the other person will love you back and that they will prove it by supporting you, protecting you, encouraging you, acknowledging you, always being there for you and basically doing everything you want or need.  But these added-on extras are not Love.  They are very important in life, but they are not Love.

Love transcends all of the mundane; it is the felt-sense of the infinite within.  The problem with love is that you depend on someone or something outside of you to trigger this inner arising.  Yoga specializes in the inner arising, so that you can experience what is already there inside you.  You are the One, infinite, blissful, Self-knowing, Ultimate Reality that is called “That.”  You are That.  You have always been That.  You are already That.  You don’t have to become That; you merely need to stop blocking the inner arising.

You block this inner experience by tightening up and closing off from the inner infinity.  Svaroopa^® yoga opens you up by beginning with your body and going much deeper, until the opening gives you direct access to That.  You come to know the pathway to the infinite within.  The more you open on the inside, the more you allow the experience of Love to arise with others.  Fear drops away.  As it becomes easier to allow the infinite to arise within you, it is also easier to see the infinite in others, even when they are not being pretty or nice.  Even when they are not doing what you want them to do.  You can love unconditionally.

Also, you can allow yourself to feel that you are loved.  Instead of looking to other people to love you, you know and feel that you are loved by that One Infinite Reality.  Instead of having to look good or to be perfect in order to be loveable, you experience that you are loved exactly as you are.  You are loved unconditionally — which is what you have always longed for.  The lifelong yearning for this feeling can never be satisfied by the people around you.  It can only be fulfilled by feeling God’s love for you.

Yoga clearly describes God.  If yoga left God out of the picture, it wouldn’t be a complete science of human experience.  Of course, yoga’s definition of God is different than most peoples’.  God is the One Ultimate Reality that has become everything that exists, pervading it and extending beyond it.  It is called “God” when you find it outside and called “Self” when you find it inside.

There is only the One, but individuals experience it in many ways.  Love, as defined by life, shows you how to find it outside, in other people.  Love, as defined in church, shows you how to find it outside, in God.  Yoga shows you how to find Love inside, in Self.

Plus, there is more.  When you begin yoga, you are exploring the Self from a place of inner unknowing.  Your Svaroopa^® yoga practice melts away tensions and the inner blocks, and the inner veil of unknowing is gradually pierced full of holes.  With each piercing, the light of your own inner radiance shines through and you are filled on the inside.  This experience overflows into your life and your relationships, emanating from the inner source.  You naturally become more committed to your yoga practice and more interested in the inner filling.  As you keep going, you get better at staying in that inner fullness, even when you are not doing yoga.

Then your life becomes an expression of That Love.  This is very different than using your life to try to find Love, trying to get moments of the inner arising.  Your inner experience of the infinite is the source from which That Love arises, and you come to experience this in every encounter, in every action and in every moment.  This is your destiny.  This is your goal.  This is your true identity.  You are not Love — you are the Source of Love.  You are That.

Originally published February 2004

By Swami Nirmalananda

Yoga is not just about how you feel — it is about WHO you feel yourself to be.  When you begin practicing yoga, it makes you feel good.  Some people describe their first yoga experience as making them feel better than ever before!  In this way, yoga is about how you feel, especially in the beginning.

According to yoga’s ancient teachings and texts, asana is a way of working with your body to quiet your mind.  There is no doubt that you need to quiet your mind, but yoga promises more than a reduction of stress.  The purpose of quieting your mind is to discover the inner source and essence of your own being, Beingness-Itself.  In other words, yoga is not about how you feel; it is about who you feel yourself to be.

One man enrolled in a meditation course with me.  One evening, I gave the group an assignment to use a mantra during the week, for the purpose of keeping calm in the midst of life.  Mantra is a way of directing your mind beyond the usual petty stuff, into your own inner essence.  This particular mantra is:

I release my desire for survival (or you can use the word “security”)

I release my desire for esteem (or substitute “affection”)

I release my desire for power (or say, “control”)

He exclaimed, “I can’t repeat that!”  I asked why not, and he said that he needed survival, esteem, power and control, because his employer was downsizing and they were expecting layoff notices any day.  As the father and sole wage earner for his family, he needed to keep his job.   I pointed out that the mantra says, “I release MY DESIRE for…” He asked, “What is the difference?”  I said, “Repeat it and you will find out.”

The following week, he returned with this story.  He repeated this mantra daily, even in the midst of the office activity.  He found that he could step back from the group clustering around the water cooler, copier or coffee pot.  Instead of participating in the constant gossip and speculation that fueled everyone’s insecurities, he would go back to his desk and get back to work.

At the end of the week, the layoff notices came out, and he was delighted to find that he was going to keep his job.  He went to his supervisor to ask why, and the supervisor said, “You were the only one doing your job, so I decided to keep you.”

Mantra is just one of the thousands of techniques that yoga provides for the purpose of shifting your inner sense of self.  This new meditator wasn’t just calmed down at work; he became a person who didn’t need to scheme and gossip in order to keep his job.

He described how this inner shift worked, explaining that he became a person with an inner sense of integrity and purposefulness that put him beyond the office politics.  He became a person who preferred to fulfill his responsibilities (the work to be done) instead of being someone so riddled with insecurities that he couldn’t see the larger picture.  He became fearless.

This is not simply feeling better; this was something much more significant and long lasting.  He didn’t just feel better; he became a new man.  He felt like he could handle anything.  Before yoga, he was a “man with responsibilities, living under a serious threat.” With the mantra, he knew himself as a man with high principles and a high work ethic, who could carry that inner reality with him even though the external landscape was shifting.  It gave him an internal continuity amidst the external change.

This internal continuity deepens with your continuing practice of poses, meditation, mantra or any of yoga’s many other practices.  It becomes a knowing of your own self at a new level, which is profoundly deeper and more intimate.  Yoga doesn’t merely make you feel better; it gives you a deeper internal point of reference.

When you have this internal point of reference, you are not shaken by external circumstances like before — this is because you have grown up.  When you were 2 years old, it was a significant event if you could not have the Popsicle you wanted.  When you were 10 years old, you felt like you were worthless if you missed the ball in a baseball game.  When you were 15, you went into agony if your clothes weren’t just right, or if a certain person ignored you.  Now, you have grown up.

Your sense of WHO you are is not dependent on Popsicles, baseball scores, riding the wave of fashion, or getting attention from a certain person; at least I hope not!   You have a bigger sense of self.  Your world has enlarged, not only on the outside, but also on the inside.  You can take it or leave it — and you can even take the loss of position or the loss of possessions in stride.  Your sense of self is bigger than that.

You can easily check it out in your own experience.  Right now.  Sit up comfortably and check in with yourself quickly.  Where do you find your sense of self?  See how deep in you have to go to find that internal point of reference that says, “I am me.”  Now, slow down your breath and smooth it out.  If you know Ujjayi Pranayama, you can create the breathing sound; if you don’t, then just smooth and slow down your breath —not forcefully, but with a quality of gentleness.  Stay with it for two or three minutes.

When you finish, immediately check inward for where you find your sense of self.  How deep inward do you have to go to find that internal point of reference that says, “I am me.”  Has it changed?  Of course!  This is because the depth of your own existence is more than you currently know it to be — it is even more than you imagine it to be.  You are Consciousness-Itself.  You are the Source and Essence of the Universe, and Beyond.

I invite you to adopt the mantra described above, though it can be hard to lift something like this off of a piece of paper.  When you sit in a room with someone teaching you how to use it, it is significantly easier.  The personal contact will empower it and empower your ability to use it.  Still, it will work.  More importantly, there are more effective mantras available, should you be interested in going further.  They are part of the ancient ever-existing science of yoga.  Poses work too, especially the way we work with the body in Svaroopa^® yoga — opening the internal levels of the body creates an inner opening to the depth of your own Being.

Asana and meditation are only two of yoga’s eight entry points to the inner experience of your own essence.  The science of yoga offers you so many rich and beautiful opportunities — not just to change how you feel, but to change who you feel yourself to be.  Do more yoga!

Excerpted from November 2003 article

By Swami Nirmalananda

Life is constant change.  Yoga’s ancient texts clearly describe this constant change in exquisite detail.  They explain that this world is based on change, a constant progression of events that are sequencing themselves through time.  There are two types of change, regardless of whether you are creating the change or whether it is being thrust upon you.

One change is simply for the sake of novelty or variety, also called entertainment. This is the one that you see most commonly — society’s norm.  A superficial type of change, sometimes you want to change things around just for the novelty of it.  A woman described to me that she drives a different route to work every day.  I asked her why, and she said, “A change is nice.”  Yes, it is.  However, usually you crave variety in order to distract you from what is going on inside.  There are inner blocks preventing your access to the deeper dimension of your own being, so you look for something to create an enjoyable diversion on the outside.

The other type of change is called personal growth. This is a change that clears the inner blocks preventing your experience of your own blissful, eternal, immortal essence.  Of course, if you don’t clear out these inner blocks through yoga, life’s seemingly random events will force you to this change.  Personal growth is actually an opening into consciousness, sometimes in spite of yourself.  It is the clearing away of the inner constrictions that currently block your deep inherent knowing of your own being as Consciousness-Itself.

When you do Svaroopa^® yoga, you are choosing the personal growth type of change.  Whatever gets you started in yoga, when you get the thing you wanted — you were changed.  Maybe you wanted help with your physical aches and pains, healing on more subtle levels (to calm your mind or heal your emotions), or for stress relief and relaxation.  When you get what you have come for, you are changing.  This is personal growth, not just a type of entertainment.  This is an opening into consciousness.

Maybe you even started Svaroopa^® yoga because you wanted to open the inner spiritual dimensions, but when they open — it is still a change from where you were.  Many of you are experiencing all of these changes simultaneously: healings, relaxation and opening into consciousness.  That’s one of the best things about yoga.

Along with change, you also want stability, safety, consistency and security in your life.  You have or you want a home, as well as to work in a fulfilling profession with a satisfying level of personal income and other things as pillars in your life.  You may have pets and you want them to be healthy and live a long time; you want your family members to be healthy and happy, and to live for a long time.  It takes a lot of work to pull this off — you have to do the laundry, get the car serviced, water and weed the garden, and spend time with the people in your life, even when they are cranky and unhappy – or especially when they are cranky and unhappy.  You have to remember their birthdays if you want them to remember yours.

All of this creates an external form of continuity.  You try to create this external continuity because you are hoping for a sense of safety to come from the outside, so the internal levels of panic will subside and your crazy mind will quiet.  The true sense of continuity comes from the innermost essence of your being, the Self.  The Self is consistent, complete, and content — the inner continuity of Consciousness-Itself, Consciousness-Itself being you.

The Supreme Reality of your Own Being is inwardly experienced as unbroken consciousness, the unchanging sense that “I am I.”  It is the unchanging Reality within.  — Shri Shankaracharya, Vivekachudamani

Have you ever been a passenger on a car trip and you nodded off?  You were watching the scenery, and the driver was driving, and you dozed off.  Maybe you were going along through the woods, and then you woke up and you found that you had arrived at the beach.  The outside is completely different and you don’t even know how you got to where you are.  But you still have this sense of inner continuity.  You don’t even have to think of it to make it exist.  You still are who you were, even though you are in a different place.

It’s like this when you go to sleep, even though your mind stops attending to things.  It can rain outside and you don’t know it.  There might be a thunderstorm at night.  The next day, someone says, “Did you hear the thunder?”  “No…  I was asleep.”  You are unaware of the outside, even though things are still going on.  But inside, at a deeper level than sleep, there is the Self.  It never blinks out.  It never goes unconscious — it is Consciousness-Itself.  It is never unaware.  It is always aware — even aware of your sleep.

You may have had the experience that you knew you were sleeping while you were asleep.  The Self is the knower — always aware, knowing all, experiencing all.  The Self is being all.  The one Self has become everything that exists, including you.  So when you wake up, you have this inner feeling of continuity.  Even though your mind was asleep, and the outside was not a continuity of experience, the Self was continuous.  The Self IS continuous.  You exist.

Excerpt from Continuity Amidst Change, published October 2003

By Swami Nirmalananda

I remember silently bemoaning my life, in the middle of an intense personal crisis.  The history of my life looked to me like I had been trying to walk across an ice rink on high heels, slipping and teetering from one near crash to another with a few flashy falls along the way.  This was B.Y. (before yoga).  Life definitely wasn’t working for me.  It had never been working.  It didn’t even make any sense to me and I was in despair again.  There were no tears — I was beyond crying.

As I sat there, I experienced a strange sensation uprising within me — a dawning realization that there was something underneath all the turmoil.  It was an amazing inner feeling of continuity.  In that moment, everything changed.  I knew, in all of the precipitous changes I had been through, something deeper had been there all along.  The one constant, in the midst of all those changes, was me — I was there.

No matter who else was involved, I was there and I had somehow found my way through.  Even when life was a complete flop, I survived.  Even when there were scars from what I went through, I kept on going.  I knew something in that moment and it has never left me.  I knew I could trust.  This is not a trust of anything outside of me, not even a trusting that I will always choose the right direction to go, but the trust of this inner something that was and is always there for me.  It was the beginning of the end of fear.  It was the experience of the inner continuity of being that underlies the constant change, life itself happening on the surface of that deeper reality.

I had found what a yogic sage described 1300 years earlier:

The Supreme Reality of your Own Being is inwardly experienced as unbroken consciousness, the unchanging sense that “I am I.”  It is the unchanging Reality within.

-Shri Shankaracharya, Vivekachudamani

Wow!  What if I did the practices that the sages recommend?  Might I find the “more” that they promise?  And maybe even without all the pain I’d been using to prompt my transformations?

The answer is a resounding yes.  It is the enlightened masters that unlock the key to discovering who you already are.  This is not a DIY operation.  This is a path of Grace.

Excerpt from Continuity Amidst Change, published October 2003

By Swami Nirmalananda

A bird flaps its wings to take off and gain height, working hard to overcome the pull of gravity. Then it finds air currents and just floats through the air.  It’s so wonderful to watch it soaring overhead, wings extended wide as it surfs the air-stream.  Sometimes you can see it dip one wing or angle its tail feathers to navigate in a different direction; it takes only a minimal movement to create a significant change in trajectory.  This is not hard work!  Birds know how to use the wind beneath their wings.  You need to find the same thing — that which lifts and supports you from inside.

Using yoga to investigate your feelings is a process of becoming lighter and freer, like a bird.  Everything about a bird is engineered to be light, so it can float on the breeze; even the bones of a bird are hollow so it can fly more easily.  With your own inner state, when you first feel an internal disturbance, you can recognize that an emotion or feeling is stirring up.  This is an internal heaviness.  You can practice the “yoga of emotions” by:

1. feeling the feeling,
2. finding the desire that creates it, and
3. releasing the desire.

When you practice this yogic release, you become progressively lighter and lighter.  Your old emotional set-point lifts to a new level.

Most people take it for granted that life will be an endless series of ever-changing moods, described as “normal ups and downs.”  Charted on a graph, you might see as much above the axis as below and even wish for balance by having the two be equal.  Thus, your times of feeling extra-good would balance out with your times of feeling extra-bad, and most of the time you live somewhere in the middle.  That’s your emotional set-point, neither happy nor sad.  Fortunately, yoga promises much more than a normal person could ever hope for.

Life does guarantee that you will have many different kinds of experiences, all of which are opportunities to feel.   Your moods do go up and down, above and below your emotional set-point.  Some people experience a greater range of ups and downs than others.  It is important that your range, both going above and below the set-point, should not be too small — or you are shutting off your own feelings.  This is called repression and denial.  It is also important that your range not be too big, as you live on an emotional roller coaster.  This is actually an addiction, one that is very hard to cure.  Yet you don’t want life to be a flat-line either.

Researchers looked into the well-accepted psychological theory that every person has an emotional set-point. According to this theory, you have life experiences that make you feel wonderful, and then you drop back down to your own individual set-point.  At other times, you feel terrible but you return to your set-point again.  This set-point (the theory says) is uniquely yours and remains unchanged throughout your life, with some people being innately happier and others living on the edge of despair.  Somebody recently gave me a sheet of Winnie the Pooh stickers — Eeyore has a very different individual set-point than Tigger.

These researchers had different groups doing different things that might affect their set-point, including one group who did yoga and meditation.  You will not be surprised at the results, though the scientists were — the yogis’ set-point changed.  The researchers described clearly that this was not a temporary high that the yoga-subjects were feeling — their emotional set-point was lifted up a few points, a permanent change.

Yoga describes its goal as a steady state of illumined insight and bliss, called sthita-praj~na (stih-taw praj-nya) in the Bhagavadgita.  Eeyore has a steady state, but it is not sthita-praj~na.  He is consistently unhappy, the confirmed pessimist.  His state is steady but not one of bliss.  Tigger also has a steady state, but not sthita-praj~na.  He is consistently giddy, unabashedly enthusiastic regardless of what is going on or how other people are reacting.  His state is happy but not sthita-praj~na.  It is ignorant bliss.  Sthita-praj~na is not ignorant.   It is a constant wind beneath your wings, an inner experience of knowing and blissful-beingness that is always supporting you from inside.

As you practice the yoga of emotions, you begin to see that you really have choice about the way you feel.  Untangling the knotted threads of your emotions is a process of becoming light and free on the inside.  This experience is promised in the yoga texts.  You will be set free from the trap of your emotions, whether you want to be or not.

“I don’t want to give up my downs,” a yoga student said to me.  “I don’t want to be happy all of the time.”  I was amazed that she would say this.  As I questioned her, it became clear that she believed that you can only go as far upward as you go down.  She feared that giving up the “downs” meant she would have to give up the “ups.”  In yoga, it really doesn’t work that way.  Remember the people in the research study:  their emotional set-point went up.  What would happen if they did yoga for more than the short time period of the study; do you think it would continue to rise?

Mahatma Gandhi’s favorite part of the Bhagavadgita was the last part of the second chapter.  He had the last 19 verses read aloud every afternoon in his Ashram (residential yoga community).  They describe one who lives in a steady state, sthita-praj~na.

When you release all the desires your mind can conjure up and turn your attention inward, you will be filled by your own inherent Inner Divinity.  Such a yogi is sthita-praj~na, one who is established in illumined insight and bliss.  (2.55)*

The text goes on to describe this steady state as being:

• indifferent to happiness
• free from need, fear and anger
• untroubled by unfavorable results
• not elated by getting desired results
• not affected by praise or blame (2.56-57)*

Unfortunately, this can be easily misunderstood and sound like someone who is cold, distant, clinically depressed, withdrawn or even dissociated.  None of this is what the text means.  Further lines in this section make it clear:

All your suffering is destroyed and you become profoundly joyful and deeply peaceful. Your state becomes completely steady in this inner joy and peace. (2.65)

This is not a description of someone who has withdrawn from other people and the world.  It is a profound promise that you can live with your heart and your eyes open.  You see the world as it really is, not recoiling from the truth, nor lusting after something that will provide you with temporary satisfaction while leaving that deeper “itch” unscratched.  This is about raising your emotional set-point to a level higher than you can currently imagine.

However good you can imagine that it can be, it gets better.  The constant arising of bliss supports your steady state in the inside (sthita-praj~na).  It is further supported by your constant recognition of others as many different expressions of the One Reality that is your own Self.  Each moment is a divine reunion of Self meeting Self in all its various disguises.

You must know and remember that there is a goal.  Remember where you are headed, just like if you get in your car for a drive — don’t take the wrong turn.  You really do have a choice.  Yoga gives you the power of that choice.  You have so many tools that you can use:

• Sit or stand in a yoga pose, or even take a few minutes for a Shavasana break.
• Use two or three Ujjayi breaths to get a “reset” whenever you need it.
• Look at your emotions, and let go of the desire hidden inside of them.
• Practice contentment — becoming at ease with what is really happening, even if it is not what you thought you wanted.
• Surrender — ending the efforting/straining and “go with the flow.”
• Live in the Presence — of your own Divine Essence, or the presence of the Divine in any form you can relate to.
• Silently repeat a mantra or a familiar (short) prayer. Repeat it many times.
• Allow yourself to receive the Grace that is always surrounding and supporting you — the wind beneath your wings.

While you remember the goal, you must also understand that this is a process.  When you realize that you have gotten lost in your feelings again, just keep putting one foot in front of the other.  Do more yoga.

Originally published September 2003

By Swami Nirmalananda

Let’s explore how a yogi deals with feelings.  The world of feelings is complex and confusing.  However, without feelings, there is no real juice in life.

Recognize many different things are meant by one word, “feeling.”  It includes physical sensations, as well as emotions.  Also, it can refer to intuitive perceptions about people or situations outside of you (like knowing when someone is thinking of you), or subtle perceptions of the vast inner realms of consciousness (like sensing your own immortality).  There are many levels of feeling, from physical to subtle, and they are all important.

The yoga texts of Kashmiri Shaivism describe 36 tattvas, beginning with the expansive reality that existed before the Big Bang, named Shiva.  This shows how consciousness contracts into all that exists, becoming the universe while still being greater.  Shiva also manifests the three levels of your mind, as well as inspiration, desire, your sense of mortality and your sense of immortality.

About halfway between the infinite and the finite are listed the ten senses.  These include the five familiar senses (organs of perception), as well as five organs of action.  “Feeling” is one of the organs of perception.  It is your ability to experience “sensations,” a broadly inclusive term.  This ability to feel sensations gets concentrated in your physical body, but exists at a more subtle level as well.

At the physical level, you move your body around in order to have different sensory experiences.  You experience the subtle level in your dreams, where you feel sensations without your body going anywhere or doing anything.  The subtle level is just as real as the physical.  In addition, the subtle levels of mind and emotions affect you; you have already proved to yourself that you can think yourself into exhaustion.

The perception of “feeling” is related to the organ of action called “handling.”  Handling includes your ability to use your hands as well as to handle the situations and people in your life.  The relationship between these two — feeling and handling — means that, when your ability to feel physical sensation is diminished, your ability to handle your life will be similarly diminished.

Many people have numbed out their ability to feel their physical body.  The tightest areas in your body are also where you have diminished perception.  Right now, you may be protesting that you have an area of chronic pain — but, check it out, the same spot on the other side of your body does not hurt.  The side that does NOT hurt is actually tighter than the side that does hurt, but it is numbed out so you cannot feel it at all.

Of course, in Svaroopa^® yoga we release the multiple layers of tension by beginning at your tailbone and opening your spine in sequence.  As the tensions in your body begin to release, you enjoy a new flexibility and spaciousness in your body.  You can feel your body when it is not hurting, and when you are not pushing or straining it.  It is a wonderful, even blissful, sensation of your own tangible physical existence.

Without being able to feel, you are not fully alive.  Your body may be like a walking corpse — already stiff and numb before its time.  As Svaroopa^® yoga opens up your body again, you become more fully alive.  You also begin to be able to feel more than just physical sensations.  It is impossible to work with the body without dealing with emotions.  You must feel.  Yoga says you must feel without getting lost in your feelings.

Every emotion is a physical sensation.  You can see why some people will shut down their body, so they won’t have to feel their emotions.  When you shut down your body and the emotions, you avoid feeling anger and fear.  You escape the experience of despair, sadness, blame and guilt.  But you also cannot feel genuine happiness, which is a full-bodied experience.  You miss out on generosity, compassion, creativity, hope and delight.  There is no feeling of inner peace or fulfillment, because there is no “feeling” at all.

Detachment is not the answer.  You already know how to withdraw and distance yourself from others.  You even know how to withdraw and split yourself off from yourself, unfortunately.  This is not yoga, and it is not yoga’s meaning of the word, “detachment.”  You must feel.  You must feel without getting lost in your feelings.

We train you in how to feel in every class.  Svaroopa^® yoga is not a “performance yoga.”  It is “consciousness-yoga.”  While we begin with your body, we train you in awareness.  Shavasana, the Relaxation Pose at the beginning of class, begins with, “Become aware of your toes…” Listen closely next time. It is not a Guided Relaxation; it is a Guided Awareness.  After you do the poses and open up the tight places — to redeem/re-enter/re-enliven your body — we take you back to being aware of it again.  This is a very powerful training that increases your ability to use this organ of perception, “feeling.”

I know that getting into your feelings can be scary.  It is too easy to get lost in them, just like if you were lost in the woods.  There are a few things that can help you — you can practice the yoga of emotions:

1. Stay in the feeling.  Don’t shut it down, and don’t act on it.  This is the hardest thing of all — keep feeling it but don’t act on it.  Don’t even put words to it.  Stay in the feeling of it.  It is physical — it may be raw.  Stay with it.
2. Recognize that it is a feeling — it is not who you are.  You are having the feeling; you have NOT become the feeling.  You can even name the feeling to yourself, “I am feeling anger.”  Don’t say, “I am angry.”  Your true “I” is much bigger than the temporary experience of anger — no matter how big the anger is.
3. Identify the desire hidden inside the feeling.  Every unpleasant emotion has a desire hidden in it.  If you are angry, you are reacting because you wanted things to go a different way.  If you are sad, you are reacting because you wanted things to go a different way.  If you are blaming someone for something, you are reacting because you wanted things to go a different way.  Do you notice the pattern yet?  Every single feeling comes from a desire that things be different than they really are.  Identify the desire and name it.
4. Now, give up the desire.  Spend a few minutes with this one.  Don’t rush it.  You might decide to notice that your desire isn’t being fulfilled.  You are in the middle of a feeling that wants to completely take over because, and only because, you haven’t accepted that things are actually the way they are.  You are rejecting reality — except reality isn’t changing to accommodate you.  So, just get real.  Accept that the situation is the way it really is.  And, for at least the moment, give up the desire that it be different.  You can always decide later if you will work toward changing it.  Your ability to be effective will be significantly enhanced by giving up the desire that fuels your emotion.  Just give up the desire hidden within the feeling.
5. Now, it is possible that you will find fear hidden under the desire.  If so, acknowledge the fear.  You might choose to speak the truth about your fear and vulnerability, or you might not.  The emotion that started the whole thing is already gone — and the person you are speaking to may be able to hear the truth of your fear, and may even be compassionate or helpful.  Of course, not everyone you know will respond this way, so you have to be intelligent about who you share this level of your feelings with.
6. Fear is also just a feeling.  If you stay with it, don’t push it away — it dissolves.  I guarantee it.

I know that these things are not easy, but they are essential.  You will have no life at all unless you do this work — peeling the layers.  If you decide to do this “yoga of emotions,” there is an increasing subtlety and beauty that opens up inside as you begin to be able to feel.

1. Feelings as Physical Sensation — your body becomes progressively more open, less painful and more blissful as your ability to feel it improves.
2. Feelings as Emotions — you become able to live in the moment, feeling the range of human experience without getting caught up in desire, knowing yourself as something much greater than your emotions.  A deeper quality of peace begins to support you and spread through all your relationships.
3. Feelings as Intuition — subtle perceptions begin to show you a deeper level of what is happening around you, and you begin to read the situations and find the answers more easily.  After a while at this level, you realize that desire still plays too strong a part and you give up this subtle form of “fortune telling.”
4. Feelings as Subtle Knowing — you begin holding consciousness within you, supported by a continuous all-pervasive inner sense of knowingness and beingness.  Desire has no hold on you anymore, because the inner feeling is so fulfilling that you would not want to give it up for any external desire.
5. Feelings as Vastness and Ecstatic Reality — the progressive inner melting into consciousness becomes a sweet surrender, and continues expanding without end, described clearly in the yoga texts.  Now you can live your life in the midst of the world, recognizing it all as the manifestation of Shiva.

You can decide how far you want to go, or when you want to get lost again.  Do more yoga.

OM svaroopa svasvabhava.h namo nama.h

Originally published August 2003