By Swami Nirmalananda Saraswati

Yoga’s ancient sages tell us that a perfect body is not enough.  Once you achieve physical health, beauty, strength, stamina and vitality, you’ll still be looking for something more.  You can set your whole life up perfectly and you’ll still be looking for something, an indefinable something.  You can’t find it because you don’t know what it is you are looking for.  What you are looking for is your own Self.  It isn’t found outside of you; you find your Self inside yourself.

You need help in this inner discovery.  You had help in learning how to look outside.  From your earliest days, people wiggled toys in front of your cute baby face.  They tweaked your nose, talked in squeaky voices and marveled at your big beautiful eyes.  They did everything they could to draw your attention outward and make you dependent on them.  Well, the truth is that you were dependent on them:  food, drink, body care — even life itself came from them and still depended on their care.

They took you through the essential steps of human conditioning, training your mind in how to desire, need, fear, grieve, project onto others, get angry, blame and feel guilty.  Play came naturally to you.  Joy, laughter, tears — none of these needed to be taught.  But dependency on others had to be taught.  The seeds were already within you, planted by your own actions in lifetimes preceding this one, thus those who birthed and raised you simply nurtured your own karmic seeds, helping you to bring them to fruition.  Thus you were inclined toward looking outside for fulfillment and they helped you learn how to do it.

Your inner impulse toward upliftment comes naturally to you.  The more you lose your Self, the more your Self pushes up within you, demanding to be recognized.  The more lost you get in the outer world, the less happy you are and the more you yearn for that indefinable something.  Everyone yearns, but not everyone seeks.  You’re a seeker.  You’re looking for what you’ve never lost, but you’re looking on the outside.  It’s time to look inward.

Let’s say that you decide to give it a try.  You buy a book or tape on meditation. You sit in the corner, look inward and what you find is your crazy mind.  Some meditative systems teach you to watch your mind.  Yoga teaches you how to still your mind and look deeper, a profoundly different approach, and (important!) yoga offers more.  Yoga makes the inward shift easy, through Grace.

I learned about Grace when I met my Guru.  I didn’t know that it was possible that someone could help me find me.  Through decades of practice, and especially through the way his Guru had propelled Baba into consciousness, Baba was able to give the same gift to me.  The gift of Grace makes the inward turning easy, even irresistible.  That Grace flows through Svaroopa^® yoga.  That Grace flows through your spine.  This is why Svaroopa^® yoga works so deeply and profoundly — this is a path of Grace.  Do more yoga.