By Mark Dawes, Staff Reporter
Internationally renowned yoga instructor Amrit Desai, 71, is in the island at the invitation of the Shakti Yoga Centre. - Norman Grindley/Staff Photographer
YOGA IS not a
religion but it is spiritual, says internationally renowned yoga instructor, Amrit Desai, as he described this way of life that is increasingly gaining in popularity around the world, especially among people who are highly health conscious.
Yogi Desai, 71, is in the island at the invitation of the Shakti Yoga Centre in St. Andrew. He will deliver seminars today and tomorrow - both of which will be convened between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. at the centre. Today he is scheduled to address the topic: 'Awakening to the Sacred Source.' Tomorrow he speaks on 'Redesign Your Destiny: Dissolving Karma through Yoga Nidra.'
Originally from India, Yogi Desai has lived in the United States since 1960. He operates his own yoga training school - The Amrit Yoga Institute - in Salt Springs, Florida.
Yoga, because it was born in an Indian and Hindu culture, has been influenced by those cultures. Despite these cultural influences, Yogi Desai argued, "You don't have to believe in God or goddesses or any of the other approaches in order to practice yoga. Even if you don't believe in God, you can realise the essential truth of life."
For some Christians, however, yoga has satanic links and these connections are sometimes evoked by the chants uttered in yoga rites. But the chants, said, Yogi Desai date back to ancient days when in India, persons "used to call certain deities that represent certain energies that work in our bodies. So they are not deities that we connect with religion. They connect with the body. So when you chant certain mantra, they awaken certain energies in your body. That is where some people can misunderstand this as a religion because symbolism in those days was used that way. But symbols are universal, they are not Indian or American or Christian or Hindu. They are just symbols-- that represented something for our health for our wellbeing."
He traced yoga's origins to about 6,000 years ago in India. But he insists it is not Hinduism or any other Indian religion. "It is the science of self-discovery, that applies to everyone equally regardless of nationality, religion or social background If people can learn to get in touch with their health, their well-being, their peace of mind, they can actually follow whatever religion they are following more closely..."
'Yoga' means integration, and all human suffering, he said, comes from internal conflict as different parts of the individual's composition are not experiencing harmony. Where harmony is absent, stress results. This stress, he said, is at the core of human physical, mental and emotional inhibitions, limitations and sicknesses.
How to enter a particular state of relaxation using various techniques such as yoga-postures, stretching one's body, lengthening one's muscles, increasing the circulation in your body, removing the toxins and also using certain breathing controls, constitute some of the main techniques of yoga to manage one's thoughts, emotions, fears, and various emotional states, Yogi Desai said.
"Yoga is about being flexible from your belief systems, your self-concepts, fears, habit-patterns. It is to become flexible on all levels: physical, emotional and mental levels. Being more open and receptive to
the reality of life. The yoga that I teach is about flexibility at all levels. I don't ask people to push themselves to such an intensity where they would hurt themselves -- Yoga is not about (physical) flexibility. There are
many (physically) flexible miserable persons in this world--it is about mental discipline.
"In yoga you can realise the human potential that lives within you. If you call that God that is up to you. If you don't call that God, that is up to you. But that is within each one of us and is dormant and unrealised. When you practise yoga you realise it. Some people call it God, some people call it divine potential, some people call it spirituality. If you call none of it and you just practise, you will realise it," the visiting guru said.
The person practising yoga, he continued, will be able to diagnose his/her problems without the benefit of being told. "If you recognise (the problems) yourself you can correct it better than when someone shows you what are your faults. So it gives you the unique ability to see what are your drawbacks, what are your inhibitions, why is your health so bad, why are you so easily irritable, why are you easily frustrated, why are you so angry and revengeful, why are you rejecting yourself. So a person begins to realise this and so when he goes into a deep relaxed state, he has an access to make the alterations that he cannot make if he thinks of himself in negative terms like 'I am wrong, I am bad, I hate myself' and adopt ideal behaviour you can adopt a self-righteous behaviour but it doesn't change the real you. Yoga teaches you how to change it from the where it is caused," Yogi Desai said.
"In order to do that you have to go to a deeply relaxed state. If you are agitated and if you are frustrated and even if you are thinking ideal thoughts, you can't go there to change your behaviour. Your prayers will not answered and your affirmations will not be actualised. In order to change all that, you have to go into a meditative state - a very relaxed state, where you can connect with the core, the source, and the spirit within you. That is when you can make the changes. And that is available regardless of what religion you practice. That is why it (yoga) is not religious. Because it is just the techniques. If you practise it, you will be able to connect to the infinite source of potential that is always present within you. Then you can actualise your potential," the yoga master said.
For Yogi Desai, there are no universal rights and wrongs as such are man-made constructions. So he argues: "If you make yourself right you see others as wrong. If you see yourself as wrong and see others as right then you still haven't solved the problem." He advocates the reaching within oneself to a point where one can exist beyond right and wrong and thereby attain unity and integration with everything in the world.
Yoga, he stressed, is more than the exercises but it is wellness directed at a person's emotional and mental being. Body, mind and spirit, he said, are connected by a life-energy, which works through the human breath. When the breath stops at death, the body and mind stops functioning, but the spirit leaves the body - but where it goes, the famed Yogi had no answers.
* Send feedback via email to mark.dawes@gleanerjm.com
