On the Householder Path Part 11
by Shobhan Richard Faulds
*Reprinted, with permission, from Swami Kripalu's Yoga of Success and Self Realization by Richard Faulds (37-39).
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The essence of yoga is not a posture, a breathing exercise, or a state of meditation. It's following the example of yoga's founding sages by using these and other disciplines to access the universal power and intelligence within you through the doorway of the inner self. Contemporary posture-based yoga is criticized for having lost its spirit, but what this means is often equated with a disregard for the niceties of Indian culture. Yoga’s true spirituality arises not from its outer trappings, but from its ability to reveal your inner incandescence. Oriented to this guiding intention to tap into the power of your own energetic source, you can effectively engage the various tools and teachings of yoga to revitalize the body, illumine the mind, and actualize your potentials in all areas of your life.
I remember my introduction to the term atman, and, a little later, Buddha-nature, in a comparative religion class. At this time, I was a junior in college struggling to make my way in life through a mental maze of opposite running headlong into all sorts of push/pull conflicts. My inner state meshed with what I’d learned in Psychology 101, where the thankless role of the self or ego is to mediate between the instinctual drives of the assertive id and the restraining ideals of the superego. With the conscious mind likened to the visible tip of an iceberg, and the majority of our behavior said to be driven by more powerful forces submerged in the subconscious and unconscious, all my efforts to grow and change felt like losing propositions.
Inwardly divided and plagued by uncertainty, I wanted to believe that my being was grounded in something deeper than my right/wrong thinking mind. It was appealing to imagine the unconscious as a repository of spiritual knowledge able to resolve life’s mysteries, among the deepest of which is the nature of consciousness itself. But those Eastern ideas alone did little to shift my experience of inner mud wrestling. Several years would have to pass before I met Swami Kripalu and found a way to test the truth of yoga’s radical assertion that everyone has an umbilical-like connection to the whole of everything that is potent enough to over-come the deficits of the polarizing thinking mind.
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Dear aspirant! If yoga is done without first knowing the atman underlying the activity of the mind and sense, it is lifeless and soulless. In this state, real progress is impossible. Consider your body pulsing with energy as a laboratory to enter and practice yoga. Then take atman as your teacher.
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