Yoga modern civilisation's great movement

 By abjuring violence, we feel we are faithfully following Gandhi’s illumined path of Ahimsa.  But like an iceberg, any outer transformation in human conduct is only a small fraction of the truth a great movement embodies.  Those who have embraced Ahimsa solely as a practice of nonviolent behavior have missed Gandhi’s deeper message. “Ahimsa”, he said, “is not the crude thing it has been made to appear.  Not to hurt any living thing is no doubt a part of ahimsa.  But it is its least expression.  The principle of ahimsa is hurt by every evil thought, by undue haste, by lying, by hatred, by wishing ill to anybody.  It is also violated by our holding on to what the world needs.”  When we attune ourselves to a great movement’s deeper message, we discover that, at its root, it is inviting us to pursue inner transformation, not simply outer transformation. 

And so, as we celebrate International Yoga Day, perhaps we will benefit from reflecting not simply on theouter transformation that Yoga has come to stand for in modern times, but the possibilities it holds for inner transformation as well.Yoga, a discipline from India that is so ancient in its roots that we can only credit it to unknown truth-seekers from some glorious past era, has an outer form that has seized the imagination of people across the globe today:  for between twenty minutes to an hour ever day, disconnect from the world, take your body through an array of yoga poses, breathe deeply, keep the mind focused, and presto!  You will emerge relaxed, rejuvenated, and ready again to re-engage with the relentless pace of life.By all counts, yoga is one of modern civilisation’s great movements.  In the US itself, more than 20 million people today are pursuing yoga — one out of every ten adults.  The writer is Professor of Practice, Columbia Business School and is the Founder, Institute for Personal leadership

This yoga revival is in direct response to people’s increased hunger for physical and mental well-being, and a growing suspicion that there’s more to the pursuit of happiness than the material accouterments modern civilization makes us accumulate.  A panoply of yoga instructors have arrived to offer their own twists to ancient poses.  Western inventiveness has flourished in the bountiful soil of yoga; today, some instructors in the West are even offering Doga - yoga for your dog. But what is the deeper message of yogaIJ  Is there something altogether more powerful for us to seek beyond outer transformation through lower stress, more toning, and greater fitnessIJ  Many practitioners sense that yoga is inviting them to embark on an inner journey, but don’t know where it will take them, and how to get there.

To take this deeper dive, we need to start with the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, one of the authoritative and few-surviving ancient texts on yoga.  Patanjali reminds us that the word “yoga” means “union” - the dissolving of one’s individual self in the larger ocean of consciousness that pervades the universe - and that to help us achieve this union is yoga’s real purpose.  Now you might think, what is this “universal consciousness” thatPatanjaliis referring toIJ  And even if it does exist, how can I ever get thereIJ This is where themodern movement of yoga is still in its infancy; on the question of yoga (union), it has no clear guidance to offer its followers.

Enter Yogananda.  Born in 1893 in Gorakhpur, India, this modern-day seer alighted on American soil at the young age of 27 with a mission to reawaken humanity to the power of yoga for inner transformation.  Over the next three decades he brought this message to packed audiences of thousands at congregations in all major US cities, dressing this ancient teaching in a practical modern form he called Self-realization - a journey toward realizing and reclaiming your true self.  As people were being buffeted by the thunderous wrath of two world wars and a major depression, he exhorted them to practice yoga so they could discover that the transcendental force they were invoking was already with them - in fact, it was within them.  The successful yogi, he stated, “can stand unshaken midst the crash of breaking worlds.”  As he traversed the continent delivering his message of yoga, US President Calvin Coolidge invited him to the White House for a personal audience.

 Today he is recognized among yoga experts as the Father of Yoga in the West.

Great teachers look into the vast beyond and then craft their message to speak not just to their immediate audience but to future generations as well.  As early as 1920, Yogananda recognized that yoga would be a boundless fountain to quench people’s growing thirst for meaning, authenticity and a personal experience of truth.  So he laid the foundation of an institution, Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF), for propagating his teaching for posterity, along with a sister-organization in India, YogodaSatsanga Society. Since its founding, SRF/YSShas helped ignite the inner flame of yoga in communities worldwide, and today there are tens of thousands of SRF/YSS members who follow Yogananda’s teaching even in the most remote corners of the globe.  He also set up a monastic order in India and the US, which today includes over 200 monks and nuns who are living exemplars of yoga, their lives dedicated to Self-realization and to serving the organization’s mission.

Yogananda’s teachings don’t simply stop at the idea of universal consciousness.  He correctly anticipated the growing hunger among spiritual seekers for direct personal experience of the universal consciousness that the masters of yoga, and indeed mystics of every religious tradition, describe.  He therefore developed a set of powerful but practical techniques to guide truth-seekers on the spiritual path all the way to the ultimate union, drawing on the eight steps laid out by Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras. The modern conception of yoga - with its emphasis on outer transformation - is based on the third of Patanjali’s eight steps, asana.  Asana emphasizes physical fitness for the purpose of getting the body ready for the stillness that is required for the inner journey taken in the subsequent step.

 Yogananda, realizing the challenges of modern life, astutely extracted and modified the most critical asana-practices to create a set of psycho-physical energization exercises that were powerful yet practical for non-experts to practice in everyday life. 

But prior even to asana are the first two steps of yama and niyama - principles to guide one’s everyday conduct and to prepare oneself for Self-realization.  Yoga emphasizes the importance of self-discipline as a foundation for the harmonious physical, mental and spiritual development a yogi pursues.  Yogananda’s extensive library of published works, and the lessons he arranged for SRF/YSS to provide truth-seekers, are replete with guidance on how to live a balanced life, eliminate bad habits, master one’s emotions and thoughts, and build fulfilling relationships.  Yogananda modernized the traditional teaching of yama and niyama, attuning himself to an audience who aspired as much for outer success as inner growth.  In that regard, he was a forerunner to a breed of 21st century psychologists, psychotherapists and neuroscientists who are generating powerful new insights on human nature - all aligned with Yogananda’s how-to-live teaching.

The five steps beyond asana relate to a progressive deepening of the seeker’s journey toward Self-realization, with meditation providing the pathway.  However, Patanjali’s text on these final five steps is agonizingly cryptic, with no guidance on how to execute them.  To fill this void, Yogananda revived an advanced ancient technique of meditation, Kriya Yoga, lost through the dark ages.  Kriya takes you on the ultimate journey of inner transformation, helping you tap into an ever-expanding love and ever-deepening joy that spring from within.  That, he asserted, was man’s true nature - a perfection that represents our permanent state of self within, even as it is so elusive to capture without.  Kriya “works like mathematics”, he stated, emphasizing the empirical, scientific nature of this technique.  Through regular practice, he claimed, Kriya will change the neural pathways in your brain.  ReallyIJ Can the act of mindful focusing and of interiorizing our consciousness actually bring about physical changes in the brainIJ  Very few scientists at Yogananda’s time would have felt comfortable with his claims.  Yet today revolutionary new findings in neuroscience are showing that meditation does in fact bring favorable changes in the neural pathways of the brain.  Scientific laboratories are now stumbling into truths experienced by yogis across the ages in, as Yogananda would say, the inner laboratories of their personal experience.

And what would be the inner markers that people could look for to assess their progress toward Self-realizationIJ  lower stressIJ Greater peaceIJ  He had begun his own quest for Self-realization very early in life, a story so vibrantly captured in his spiritual classic, “Autobiography of a Yogi”, culminating in his master Sri Yukteswar giving him the monastic name “Yogananda”, which means “Bliss through Yoga”.   True to his name, he exhorted truth-seekers to enjoy the early rewards of peace and well-being, but to then seek out the ultimate prize: eternal bliss. “When by constant practice of Kriya, the consciousness of [the] blissful state of the spiritual self becomes real, we find ourselves always in the holy presence of the blissful God in us.”God, to Yogananda, was thus not an external force to be idolized and worshiped and appropriated by a particular religion, but an inner force to be awoken to and realized. 

Yogananda make a triumphant return to India in 1935-36, where he spent time, among others, with India’s other great saints Anandamayi Ma and Ramana Maharishi, and nobel laureates C. V. Raman and Rabindranath Tagore.  He also met with Mahatma Gandhi in 1935, amid the height of Gandhi’s political and social activism. Ever humble, Gandhi’s first commitment in life was to evolve himself, not the world around him.  What better way to accelerate the inner journey than to pursue what Yogananda called “an airplane route” to universal consciousness, KriyaIJ  So on this one sole occasion that life brought them together, Gandhi took initiation in Kriya Yoga from Yogananda.  The bond between the two messiahs must have been very special; upon Gandhi’s assassination, Yogananda received and enshrined some of Gandhi’s ashes in the beautiful grounds of lake Shrine, an iconic Self-Realization Fellowship temple in California. 

Since his passing in 1952, many teachers have followed Yogananda’s trailblazing path to bring yoga to the world, helping make it a fixture in popular culture as it continues to take hold with young and old, the elite and the ordinary, the spiritualists and the atheists.  What distinguishes Yogananda from these subsequent emissaries is not simply that he was a pioneer of the modern yoga movement, but that he shone such a powerful and practical torchlight on yoga’s true purpose of Self-realization, and the path one can take to scaling this sublime peak. 

“[Yogananda]’s probably been the greatest inspiration for me”, the quiet BeatleGeorge Harrison once said.”I keep stacks of [his book]Autobiography of a Yogi around the house and I give it out constantly to people”, he says in the 2014 release of the much-acclaimed documentary about Yogananda,AWAKE.”When people need ‘regrooving,’ I say read this, because it cuts to the heart of every religion.”.

Compare this toSteveJobs,whorarely revealed to people his fondness for Yogananda’s autobiography - the only book he had on his iPad.  And yet, upon his passing, he arranged for every attendee at his memorial service to be given a box that contained his farewell message to them: the book “Autobiography of a Yogi.”  

So why is Yogananda not a pop icon at a time when yoga is the great movement of our timesIJ  During the 1920s, Yogananda, who was much in demand on the speaker’s circuit, consciously decided to withdraw from public speaking so he could focus on building his organization, recording his teaching, and mentoring his flock of early monastics.  “I prefer souls over crowds”, he said.  And then he added, “But I love crowds of souls.”With the growing interestin mindfulness and meditation, perhaps these words will prove to be more prophetic than wistful.

On this first International Yoga Day,the time has come to tip our hats to theteacher who first introduced the modern world to the transformative power of yoga as a timeless inner discipline.  So as you roll out your yoga mat, get into your favorite yoga pose, chant a collective ‘OM’ and feel a gentle zephyr of peace sweep over you, perhaps you can take pause to wonder at what experiences in consciousness may lie just beyond your present reach if you embark on yoga’s fuller, inner journey toward Self-realization.  Yogananda would have called those experiences “undreamed of possibilities.”

The writer is Professor of Practice, Columbia Business School and is the Founder, Institute for Personal leadership