No matter how our wheel of life carries us from our Alpha to our Omega…
No matter how long it takes to draw this perfect circle bringing us back to the source of our existence through a path of awakening experiences…
No matter how hard or smooth the way is…
…we have to find the strength necessary to overcome any obstacle, to resist to any distraction, to endure any pain.
Our body as a chariot, driven by our senses as the horses, carries our Self. Our spirit is the driver and the reins are our mind. The objects, which our senses perceive, reflect the way the Self associates with body, mind and senses as the experiencer (of pleasure and pain). Of him, who is not possessed of discrimination and whose mind is always uncontrolled, the senses are not in control like the vicious horses of the charioteer. But of him, who is possessed of discrimination and has his mind always controlled, the senses are always controllable as the docile horses of the driver.
Our worldly life can be very challenging, full of distraction either in form of misleading thoughts or of false desires. It is our goal to find the mental and physical strength to subdue them in a first level, and extinguish them in a second one. Through such a disciplined way of living, we can take small but steady steps in our journey of self-realisation, of waking up our consciousness, restoring our connection to the One Self that contains everything and realizing the eternal nature of our existence that no illusory nuisance of this unreal world can touch.
Through the discipline of yoga, we can build up the necessary mental and physical strength to embark on this heroic endeavor.
As Patanjali states in Yoga Sutras “Yoga is the restriction of the fluctuations of consciousness”. How could we ever define something that should not be defined in order to be understood…something that can only be experienced…something abstract that should not be restricted by words…something that a self-restricting human mind could never approach…? Yoga starts where thinking ends and ends where thinking starts. Yoga starts when all becomes one and ends when separation starts.
The experience of Yoga started in the East in times, when experiencing prevailed over thinking. Even back then, as human mind has always been weak, putting experience into words was the only way to convince the unexperienced worldly human mind of what yoga truly is. Yoga became substantial part of the eastern way of living, a self-evident way of experiencing the physical world as a theatre play.
Interesting is the way the western world approached yoga. Fully aligned with the needs of the western civilisation, yoga had to be understood and not experienced, to be precisely defined and restricted in order to become part of the western way of living. As a result, yoga became a product offered as a way of taking a break from the only reality we accept defined by time, money and continuous action of body and mind. Yoga was not a way of reconstructing the way the human mind interprets reality anymore. Yoga became a technique to calm our swallow mind and ease our physical pain in order to be able to keep pace with a nonstop way of living. Yoga was transformed into a lifestyle choice, ending up strengthening the western human ego instead of fulfilling its true purpose of letting go of it.
Yoga is not…a lifestyle trend…a narcissistic way of promoting the human body…a pseudo-intellectual technique…Yoga is finding your true self in everything that surrounds you and treating everyone and everything as equal as you, as part of you. Yoga is not a practice, a technique or philosophy but a timeless, boundless and attachment-free state. Yoga is experiencing the subconsciously already experienced, consciously thought to be not experienced yet. Yoga is being aware of the awareness, of realising that you never left home. Yoga is the ending of suffering caused by the human mind and ego, the melting of the separate selves and merging into the one and only self.
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