Contemplation

Each month a contemplation article written by Swami Nirmalananda Saraswati ( formerly known as Rama Berch)  founder originator of Svaroopa® Yoga will be posted to this site. You are invited to print it out and read it. Think about it and how to apply it to your life during the month.

The Svaroopa® Yoga Difference
  by Rukmini Abbruzzi and Swami Nirmalananda

Clarity, ease, spaciousness. Calm. Happiness. Joy. You need it — yoga provides. Any style of yoga provides these benefits, but Svaroopa® yoga does it differently. Let’s explore the difference.

Rukmini remembers her first-ever yoga class, “I had done yoga at home with a used copy of Richard Hittleman’s Yoga: 28-Day Exercise Plan, so I was awed to encounter a group of acrobatic, athletic yogis wearing spandex and using towels on their mats to catch the sweat. I wanted a peaceful, quiet mind, and I found it – the intense physical effort made me focus on my body, so there was little room for other thoughts. The class pushed me to exhaustion, so then I was too tired to think. Ahh, peace…”

Svaroopa® yoga provides a reliable experience of peace as well, but brings it about in an entirely different way. You don’t become exhausted; instead you are filled from your own Inner Source. You are “blissified,” In India, the land of its origin, the poses are only 10% of yoga’s technology. The other 90% is about your mind and getting beyond your mind, to experience svaroopa, your ever-blissful Divine Essence. Body-centered practice goes by the generic hatha yoga. The West offers many brand names, including Svaroopa® yoga.

The generic hatha has two translations, literal and mystical. Literally “effort-filled,” it is even translated as “forceful” and “violent.” It doesn’t mean you should hurt yourself! It means you can propel yourself towards enlightenment through rigorous self-effort. You can push yourself. Hatha yoga is DIY (Do It Yourself).

Contrast this with 90% of the yogis in India. They are sitting: sitting to listen to their Guru expound on the teachings, sitting to contemplate the teachings they’ve heard, sitting in meditation, sitting to watch the sunrise or sunset, sitting as they participate in traditional ceremonies, sitting and waiting for their own Divinity to fill into the stillness they’ve created in their mind.

Hatha yogis keep busy. They don’t sit and watch the sunrise; they do Sun Salutations. They don’t listen to teachings or contemplate them; they practice the poses and try to make their body measure up. They don’t regulate their breath in order to quiet their mind; they pump their breath in order to sustain continual movement. They don’t create stillness in their mind; they keep moving.

Swami Nirmalananda describes a yoga therapy conference she attended, “I arrived fresh from a yoga retreat in India. I’d been sitting for long sweet hours of meditation and traditional ceremonies. I joined 2,000 other yoga teachers and yoga therapists for the first plenary session, a full two hours of PowerPoint presentations by medical researchers, showing how they proved that yoga works. I arrived a little late so I sat in the back of the hall and watched the drama play out.

“Within 30 minutes, the 2,000 yoga teachers and therapists were squirming in their seats. They couldn’t pay attention to the presenters. They were wiggly, noisy and distracting. After another 30 minutes, the moderator announced, ‘I know it’s hard for you to sit, so we’re adding in a break after our next presenter.’ I was shocked. They couldn’t sit! They think yoga is about movement.”

Yoga has been growing in the West since 1893, so much that yogis now compete for championships and even Gold Medals. Google it; yoga is a sport. This is a different direction than the sages intended. Hatha yoga is described in the texts as efforting practice, a way to apply yourself physically, but for progress toward Enlightenment, not towards mastering a pose or perfecting your body. Ultimately your physical mastery gives you the ability to apply yourself to more subtle and interior practices.

Let’s look at the second meaning of hatha, the mystical meaning, found in every Sanskrit word. The syllables ha and tha name the energies that flow along the two sides of your spine: ha — along the right side of your spine; tha — along your left. When you open and balance these two flows, the energy shifts and flows through the center of your spine. In the beginning, this flow is prana, your body’s own healing power. Grace invokes a stronger flow: the transformative power of Consciousness, the power of your own upliftment. This is Kundalini. This is the Svaroopa® yoga difference.

In this mystical meaning, hatha doesn’t mean effort-filled or forceful. You won’t get any spinal release if you’re forcing. You have to ease off. You have already experienced the difference: working, pushing and trying in a pose compared to propping, softening and settling into the precise angles. More change happens when you effort less. When you combine precision with compassion, something happens. This is Grace, the power of inward expansion.

To summarize, hatha has two meanings:

  • Effort-filled or forceful, meaning your progress towards Enlightenment is self-propelled through first cultivating physical mastery, then applying your highly developed will to subtle practices.
  • Opening and balancing the energies flowing along the two sides of your spine, so the flow of Consciousness can arise from tail to top, revealing your own Divinity to you.

One is a path of self-effort, and the other is a path of Grace – two radically different paths.

Svaroopa® yoga is a path of Grace. Everyone else is on the other path. In Rukmini’s first yoga class, the movements of those athletic, acrobatic yogis were graceful. But the Grace of Svaroopa® yoga is completely different. Swami’s beloved Guru, Baba Muktananda, gave her Shaktipat initiation, awakening the dormant energy called Kundalini. Kundalini is your own Divinity in a seed form that grows and blossoms within. That transmission created Svaroopa® yoga and enlivens it today.

Swami Nirmalananda says, “After Baba sent me back to America, I could see that my students were not getting the openings that the poses are meant to provide, the openings I knew so deeply and so intimately. So I taught variations, using angles to target their spinal tensions, providing the core opening that is now named Svaroopa® yoga. It surprised me when people started getting Shaktipat. Now I realize that I was carrying my Guru’s gift of Grace to the next generation. Over the last two decades, I have watched a few teachers take the poses out to teach under a different name. While the poses are still enjoyable, their students don’t get Shaktipat. That flow of Grace doesn’t enliven their teaching or their students’ practice.”

Yet Svaroopa® yoga is a hatha yoga, so there still is self-effort involved. This is a path of both self-effort and Grace. Self-effort is very important: you must apply yourself to the practices. Yet, on a path of Grace, you have to remember to make space for something more to happen.

Patanjali pairs self-effort and surrender in Yoga Sutras 1.12, promising that your churning mind will be stilled by abhyasa and vairagya. Abhyasa is persistent practice. Vairagya is surrender, a profound letting-go. Patanjali puts the two together: self-effort and surrender. Why?

  • Self-effort is very important; you must persist in order to accomplish anything. But self-effort alone makes you prideful and arrogant, or you become mean and self-punishing.
  • Surrender is essential. In Svaroopa® yoga, we surrender to svaroopa, your own Divine Self, which is found through Grace, the gift of Freedom. Yet surrender alone makes you into a doormat, without any clarity or will, and leaves you stranded in helplessness.

You must have both: self-effort and surrender. You already know about self-effort, so we teach surrender in every class. When Rukmini tried out her first Svaroopa® yoga class, she was used to doing Shavasana in other styles of yoga — flat-on-your-back, flat-on-your-mat, 90-seconds of ticking clock at the end of class. She grudgingly accepted two zeds and a roll under her knees. And that final Shavasana was a revelation! She says, “It felt like coming home. I felt a deep comfort and ease in my body, a calm and peace in my mind. I felt bliss.”

The surrender and Grace are there in the final Shavasana; they are in every pose. Svaroopa® yoga arose out of Grace. It’s suffused with Grace in the same way that ice is made out of water. How can you take the water out of the ice?

Svaroopa® yoga is unique, a hatha yoga that’s full of Grace. You put forth effort. You make time to attend a class or have a private session. Or you practice Ujjayi Pranayama, do the Magic Four, meditate, or you do it all. Grace supports you every step of the way. But where are you going? There’s really nowhere to go. You’re not travelling to your Self because you already ARE the Self. You already ARE Consciousness-itself. Do more yoga.

To read the teachings of Swami Nirmalananda, visit her Website: www.svaroopavidya.org.For information about Svaroopa® Yoga training and retreats, visit www.svaroopayoga.org.

Copyright © 2010, S.T.C., Inc, All Rights Reserved; Please do not copy in any way without written permission.
SVAROOPA® & EMBODYMENT® are registered service marks of S.T.C., Inc and are used by permission.

 

 

 

 




























































 

Swamiji’s Monthly Contemplation – June 2012

The Yoga of Grace

Yoga is not DIY. Do-it-yourself (DIY) is a slow, laborious process that brings questionable results. DIY can be a great money-saver, though it is never a time-saver. It’s creative, productive, challenging, frustrating and satisfying to tile your own bathroom or build your own helicopter, but it never comes with a guarantee. Yoga comes with a guarantee. You will know your own Self (capital-S Self) if you follow the inward path that the yogis have trekked for generations, but you get help every step of the way.

The current Do-It-Yourself craze hearkens back to pioneer America: if you couldn’t make it yourself back then, you didn’t have it. DIY is now a big moneymaker for television. It’s an important part of the simple living movement. When you’re baking your own bread or making a quilt for someone, it’s an expression of love as well as a gift of your time and energy. Yet that gift of love, time and energy happens every time your Svaroopa® yoga teacher adds a blanket to your stack, realigns your body angles or gives you a sacrum press. If yoga was DIY, that wouldn’t happen. I remember a yoga teacher (of a different style) who bragged that she never touched her students and she didn’t even speak during class. She simply showed them how her body moved in the poses and let them do the best they could. It wouldn’t have worked for me because, I always needed help to find my blind spots!

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 chanting), there’s help every step of the way. Even if you’re doing it yourself by working through a yoga book, DVD/website or our new Pose Cards, you’re getting a boost from the writer of the books and cards and the makers of the DVD and websites. 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. Your interiorization moves through stages of contemplation (dharana) and meditation (dhyana), culminating in profound and deep experiences of inner absorption (samadhi). As a practitioner of core opening yoga poses, you already know the early levels of samadhi, found 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 has prepared you for an easy seated pose, so the meditative energy (Kundalini) can climb your spine.

Grace is the power of revelation, described in the “Siva Sutras:

Yo’vipastho jna-hetushcha — Siva Sutras 3.29
Only a yogi with mastery over the wheel of energy is capable to enlighten others

This sutra is saying that there are yogis who are capable of giving enlightenment to others! What kind of amazing gift is that? Personally, this is what got me into yoga and kept me so focused for so long. Having met such a yogi, my own Guru, I knew I was being given a gift beyond comparison — Grace. I wanted it. I knew yoga’s promise was true because I tasted it again and again; samadhi is a taste of enlightenment. I dedicated my life to finding all that yoga promises.

As I said last month, “Yoga leaves no stone unturned.” If yoga left stones unturned, the crawly critters in the hidden corners of your mind and emotions would keep you from knowing your own Self. You must unmask your inner demons, but you don’t have to do it alone. You will outgrow your fears and obsessions; this is yoga’s promise. This is due to the power of Grace.

Svaroopa® yoga is the yoga of Grace. For me, it is the yoga of Grace because I got it from my Guru. For you, it is the yoga of Grace because it jump-starts your inner evolution, the discovery of your own svaroopa — your own Divine Beingness, your Self.

Once I received initiation from my Guru, the fire of yoga began to blaze within me. I wanted to surrender to this inner flame, and learned how under my Guru’s watchful care and guidance. Kundalini taught me about core opening, through the physical movements (kriyas) she prompted in my meditations. My gratitude will never end for what my Baba gave me. Most importantly, He taught me to trust what Kundalini brought forth within me. Every time I had a doubt about a new level of inner opening (and I had many doubts), He reaffirmed for me that I could trust the arising of Consciousness within me. By the time I moved to San Diego and began teaching, I knew that I knew.

Your practice of the discipline named Svaroopa® yoga, based on the key principles of precision and compassion, allow you to mimic the physical processes I went through in my early years with my Guru. The awakened Kundalini moved me through the full range of yoga poses, but in a way that opened my spine effortlessly — a radical departure from what I was doing and what I saw others doing in our yoga classes, as we tried to move our bodies into our idea of the picture-perfect pose. I knew that “imposing” the “pose” on my body was wrong because I experienced the grace and ease of each pose in my meditations, when Kundalini moved me.

As my process advanced, I left the physical kriyas behind and experienced Kundalini clearing my mind and heart. She unraveled the crazy-bits, of which there were many, by tracking them to their inner-most kernel: again and again I confronted the fear that drove all the crazies. But I couldn’t unravel the fear. My Guru did that. I know what Grace is, for it begins the process (through Shaktipat initiation), supports the process (the ever-present umbrella of Grace) and it completes the process (the inner revealing of who you really are).

Even if you don’t know what Grace is, Svaroopa® yoga is the yoga of Grace. Every time you target the core tensions and melt them away, tail to top, you open yourself to Divine Grace again. Core opening is a process of inner opening, surrendering the way you resist your own Divinity and surrendering to the inner Reality of your own Self. The practices invoke the blessing of the ages, coming from the sages and masters of yoga, those who are gone and those still alive. Most students of Svaroopa® yoga experience Kundalini awakening within their first two years of regular study and practice; many experience this incredible gift in their first class or in their first year.

How do you know if you have been Awakened? If you feel the inner heat climbing your spine or radiating from your core, the revelatory power of Consciousness (Kundalini) is awakened and working within you. If you dive in deeper than deep, losing track of time and place in a pause between poses, or in your Shavasanas, the doorway to your own Divinity has been opened; Kundalini is opening you from the inside out. If you find yourself lifted or moved effortlessly into a deeper angle in a pose or even right into a painful spot (to burn it away), the fire of yoga (Kundalini) is moving you light-years in a few breaths.

When you get inner answers, always right even when they don’t make sense, Kundalini is showing you how to live your life by the inner compass. When you stop craving things that your mind still says it wants, Kundalini is freeing you from your compulsions. When you find that everything you thought you wanted is just a summer rerun, and you realize that what you want is something more… you’re on the path. This is yoga. This is Svaroopa® yoga. The Yoga of Grace.

Do more yoga.