Yoga as a spiritual quest, Yoga and spirituality

Yoga is a spiritual quest

One cannot help noticing that Yoga in the West has turned towards the body and neglected the spirit.

New “styles” of Yoga, such as Bikram, Ashtanga, Iyengar, Flow and many others, abandon a thousand-year-old tradition and keep only posture and the cult of the most supple, most beautiful, slimmest body, but no longer speak of the spirit, let alone of union with the unspeakable.

In the eight steps defined by Patanjali, who is in no way the creator of Yoga but one of its first compilers, posture is only the 3rd step out of eight, and for the true seeker it would be a great pity to stop at that step along the way. Certainly it is the only one visible from the outside, which makes for very aesthetic videos and showing off on the internet, but so far from the spirit of Yoga. Many think that a “perfectly performed” posture would be a guarantee of success, of who knows what, in fact! Oh yes, how exhilarating and ego-driven that is!

And yet, reading the fundamental texts of Yoga, such as Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, the Hatha Yoga Pradipika or the Yoga Tattva Upanishad, one can quickly understand that Yoga aims at something quite other than the body, that it is not concerned with it but simply rests on it. But how many Yoga practitioners have taken the trouble to read translations of traditional texts? At best they have read the opinions of Doctor So-and-so, who has turned Yoga into the aspirin of modern times and believes in chemistry and nothing else. In the end very few practitioners search in depth, preferring to stay on the surface and not take the “risk” of meeting their spirit...

“The spirit, did you say the spirit?”

The spirit was thrown out with the bathwater of religion long ago. How many people tell me they do not like religion when I speak of the spirit, and how many can no longer tell the two apart...

So what would this spiritual Yoga be?

Let us first try to define spirituality...
For me, spirituality is not about achieving a pleasant life, or “living well” in “well-being” as we currently see on social media (which is no bad thing either), but about finding a link with our deep nature, which is luminous and peaceful. It has little to do with “holiday peace”; it is a real “mystical” state that plunges us into listening to the present moment, without thought, beyond time and space. This state, with all due respect to those who think there is nothing to do to obtain it, requires real work at every moment to establish it lastingly within us.
This work goes through mastering our intellect, an intellect so developed in our societies and based on Descartes' idea, “I think, therefore I am”, whereas Yoga says: “I am when I stop thinking”, because the verb to think is at odds with the fact of being.
Some will also say that spirituality is the opening of the heart, with “luuurve”, and here too we must glimpse the possibility that this sublime and very recent idea should not be confused with an exaggerated emotional relationship.
The mystical heart is an organ of perception and not an emotional organ. It allows us to perceive "heart to heart", and so to perceive the heart of things without any moods...
So spirituality would be the discovery of the power of our spirit when it shows itself beyond our story, beyond our character who thinks of itself as separate from the rest of the world.

But it seems that even this word "spirit" frightens many people.

How sad to see that secularism French style has become something spineless which, instead of opening up to all religions, imposes a “non-religion” and a total veto. Those who teach Yoga in public institutions are even asked, in the name of this famous secularism, not to mention the notion of spirit during classes, for fear of..., who knows what?
The word "God", for its part, is of course totally forbidden, on pain of being struck down on the spot by an authority that has nothing divine left about it... ;-)

So it is clear that the world is trying to turn Yoga into a popular well-being sport and to strip it of its whole spiritual side, the better to market it and make it an ever more profitable business. The “heresy” has reached the point where people practise on plastic mats, a superb insulator, with rubber gloves to grip the floor better, or with a whole jumble of props to try to release the muscles...

Faced with this very strong will, including that of certain federations such as the International Yoga Federation, organiser of the Yoga World Championship (you are not dreaming, it is a shameful reality!!), to make Yoga a sport and even get it into the Olympic Games by stripping away its whole subtle side, how could we still speak of spirituality, let alone dare to invoke it?

And yet, anyone who travels the path of Yoga and begins to work beyond the "holy posture", working on their pranayama with mudras, bandhas and drishtis, will soon realise that the reach of Yoga is infinite. How can one fail to understand that the simple intention behind practising Shambhavi mudra (looking upwards with the eyes converging) refers to Shiva and invokes him? Shiva, the “God” of the Yogis, who has a thousand names, among them “Shambhu” or Ishvara...

God is not a belief at all but a real encounter!
How can one fail to understand that Yoga is essentially aimed at the absolute awareness that allows us to meet the spirit and its attributes, which are light and consciousness, and that the rest is given to us along the way?

This rest will disappear with our death: suppleness of the body, beauty, slimness, possessions of every kind, attachments of every kind to the body, to the character and to its story...

The brain is only a transmitter and receiver of consciousness and light (vibrations), and trying to find these in organic chemistry would be as foolish as cutting open a radio set to find the journalist who is speaking. But here too our materialistic world no longer wishes to reflect (what is it that is reflected?) or to burden itself with this non-material part that might shed light on the meaning of our futile existences, at the risk of having to look within and no longer being able to do just anything in the name of science...

This attitude is also linked to the fear of death, and to the incomprehension of death felt by Westerners without connection, not linked to their spirit. Death is unbearable for them, so they prefer a daily life completely filled with activities and actions (rajasic), leaving the spirit no chance to appear, not even in the prolonged, silent stillness of a posture. Even the new styles of Yoga try to keep the practitioner in perpetual motion, where there is no longer any room for silence and stillness, without glimpsing that the only way to step out of the grip of the body, of our story and of our character is to accept this deathlike stillness, which alone can let Consciousness appear and carry us far.

Yoga is learning about our death!

Once death is known, life is free and joyful. But in our world death must be hidden, removed from our existence, which believes itself immortal at every moment yet desperately seeks the meaning of life in exhausting outer activities and in the aesthetics of its body.

And yet, if something is to endure after this short existence, that thing must already be here within us, because death will take a great deal from us but give us nothing in return. It is up to us to find in our existence the part of the eternal that is within us and is universal. Certainly this runs counter to personal development and requires us to withdraw from all our desires, all our passions and all our attachments.
Personally I seek the light in the ordinariness of ordinary life, so there is a direction, a very strong intention, a bearing that brings restraint at every moment so as to move ever closer to it.

The practice of Yoga, postures, pranayamas, meditations, mantras and prayers (very rare among Yogis...) are tools for me, accelerators of my vibrations that allow me to move towards the light.

With each practice the body rises in vibration and everything is turned towards the light, so between practices there remains a vibration that goes towards it, carries me and supports me.

As time passes and reveals the depth of Yoga within me, the pleasures and displeasures of existence seem much less exciting to me, because each time I meet the light my heart is filled.
Of course, this is my story, but it seems to me to be in harmony with a deep meaning that sometimes escapes even yours truly, and that it takes me out of the exhausting search for pleasure and displeasure, out of the dualities of this world, to meet the light (MahaPrakasha) and its peace more and more often...

Thank you for everything!