Wednesday, March 02, 2011

What is my yoga?


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Sometimes people, strangers, as wells new students ask me what type of yoga I teach. They throw labels at me, and I wince... I myself don't know. I teach the Sivananda style, and I believe the Sadguru and his disicple who found the school to which I belong, believed in something beyond the body... But they also knew that Thing cannot be reached without discipline and cannot be reached if the body or mind was weak, so this yoga, of reaching beyond, is what I wish to teach...

So, where I personally am headed I know, though that place does not have a map ... But  I don't know if I am able to discuss that route in my class.. between my anxiety and enthusiasm to communicate that  I have always felt that I lost a lot in the telling... How do u talk where the real yoga should lead u... I wish I did not have to talk about it..Like an excellent wine which u don't discuss before sipping, or drowning a gourmet meal  with a loud debate  ...
Damn,  I really want to be able to teach my type of yoga without talking!!!

My yoga, I hope, leads u somewhere, where there is That...

Here some quotes I love about where actual yoga should lead u... and how it must break patterns within, of a complacent spiritualism or pat religion..

  • Kabir Das is as, as usual  evocative as he is hard-hitting: “With a begging bowl in hand a man with amnesia knocks on his own door.”
  • The famous quote from Mandakopanhishad describes this space within us: “There the sun does not shine, nor the moon, nor stars nor lightening. What to say then of the fires of this earth? The self-resplendent One shines in His own light. And the whole universe is a radiant with His reflected light.”
  • Catholic monk Meister Eckhart was condemned for his radical sense of the divine, which he shared with our Advaitins (non-dualists). He believed God’s essence pervaded everything. He sings:” “Every creature has a religion. Every foot is a shrine where a secret candle burns. Every cell in us worships god.”
  • Mystics believed spiritualism sought the divine inside, while organized religion sought it outside. They also warned against this subtle danger, cautioning how we are bound to fail trying to frame what refused to be contained. Zen monk Dogen warns: `Look for Buddha outside your own mind and the Buddha becomes the devil.”
  • Mira, who spun her life around god-love, sung:”The sky’s voice is such that one’s mind must be very quiet to hear god.”
  • The Vedas take us even closer towards hearing this unheard: “ My ears open to hear, my eyes open to see. The Light is hidden within my spirit shines beyond it. My mind roams with its thoughts in the distance. What shall I speak and what really shall I think?”

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In the end all words fail. Even silence fails. The divine is beyond either. Zen monk Huan has it pat: “Speech is blashphemy, silence is a lie. Above speech and silence there is a way out.”

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