All about Hatha Yoga
Sadhguru: Unfortunately in the western part of the world, if you utter the word “Yoga,” people think you must twist yourself out like rubber bands or stand on your head. Yoga is not an exercise form. The word “Yoga” means union. Today, modern science has proved that the whole existence is just one energy. So if all this is one energy, why is it that you are not experiencing it that way? If you can break the limitations of the illusion that you are separate, and begin to experience the oneness of the existence, that is Yoga. The religions of the world have always been talking about God being everywhere. Whether you say God is everywhere or everything is one energy, is it any different? It is the same reality. When it is mathematically deduced, we call it science. If you believe it, we call it religion. When you find a method to get there, we call it Yoga. So what is Yoga, what is not Yoga? There is no such thing.
Hatha Yoga: Directing Your Energies
To lead you towards the experience of Yoga – of union and boundlessness – we manipulate the energy and move the system in a certain way. Physical postures are one aspect of this. Understanding the mechanics of the body, creating a certain atmosphere, and then using the body or body postures to drive your energy in specific directions is what Hatha Yoga or yogasanas are about. Hatha Yoga is not exercise. Asana means a posture. If I sit in one way, it is one asana. If I sit in another way, it is another asana. So innumerable asanas are possible. Out of these innumerable postures that the body can take, eighty-four fundamental postures have been identified as yogasanas.
What is Hatha Yoga?
Hatha Yoga is a preparatory process of Yoga. The word “ha” means sun, “ta” means moon. “Hatha” means the Yoga to bring balance between the sun and the moon in you, or the Pingala and Ida in you. You can explore Hatha Yoga in ways that take you beyond certain limitations, but fundamentally, it is a physical preparation – preparing the body for a higher possibility. There are other dimensions to this, but to put it simply, just by observing the way somebody is sitting, you almost know what is happening with them. If you have observed yourself, if you are angry, you will sit one way; if you are happy, you sit another way; if you are depressed, you sit yet another way. For every different level of consciousness or mental and emotional situation that you go through, your body naturally tends to take certain postures. The converse of this is the science of asanas. If you consciously get your body into different postures, you can also elevate your consciousness.
Hatha Yoga is currently taught in 5 different classes: Upa Yoga, Angamardana, Surya Kriya, Yogasanas and Bhuta Shuddhi. These practices have been selected and designed by Sadhguru
Upa Yoga:
Upa Yoga is a simple yet powerful set of 10 practices that activate the joints, muscles and energy system, bringing ease to the whole system. Based on a sophisticated understanding of the body’s mechanics, Upa Yoga dispels inertia in the body’s energy and brings ease to the whole system.
Within the human system, the energy flows along 72,000 pathways called nadis. At the joints, the nadis meet and form nodes, making the joints storehouses of energy. Upa Yoga activates this energy and also lubricates the joints, creating an instant sense of alertness and liveliness. Upa Yoga essentially means “sub-yoga” or “pre-yoga”. Because of its many immediate and evident benefits, the word Upa Yoga in Indian languages is commonly used to denote “usefulness.” It is a good starting point for those who are new to yoga, and it can be used as a preparation for other yoga practices.
Angamardana:
Angamardana is a unique system of yoga which is almost completely lost these days. Traditionally in classical yoga, Angamardana was always alive. It is not like yogasanas, it is a very intense exercise where you don’t need any equipment. You are just using your body and building a completely different level of physical strength and tenacity.
In Angamardana, you use your own body weight and momentum to increase the flexibility of the muscle over a period of time. It is just a twenty-five minute process as it is being taught today by us, and in terms of health and wellbeing it can do miracles. It is a phenomenal process and is so complete. All you need is a six-by-six space; your body is everything. So, wherever you are you can do it. It is as effective in building the body as any weight training is, and it does not create any unnecessary stress on the system.
Even if you just look at it as an exercise form, Angamardana will definitely pass the test. But strengthening the muscle and bringing fat levels down are just fringe benefits. The important thing about whatever sadhana you are doing, whether it is Angamardana or anything else, is that we are trying to work up the energy system to a certain level of energy and integrity of energy. The thing is to get yourself into a state where you have a fully functioning system, because only if it is fully functioning can it be taken to heightened levels of perception. A half-a-body or a half-a-being cannot be taken to a full level of perception.
The word “Angamardana” means to have mastery over your limbs or body parts. Whatever action you want to perform in this world, how much mastery you have over your limbs determines how well you are going to do it. I am not talking about action in terms of joining up a sports team or something. I am making a distinction between action that you do for survival and action that you do for liberation. If you want to do something for your liberation and particularly for the liberation of everyone else around you, you should have some mastery over your limbs. Mastery over limbs need not necessarily mean you are going to be muscular or you can climb up the mountain. That may also happen but it is basically to strengthen the energy structure of the body.
To give an analogy, if a person walks by, you can clearly see whether his body is well-exercised or not simply by the way he walks. If you look at a person’s face, you can see whether his mind is well-exercised or not. Similarly, if you watch closely enough, whether someone’s energy is well-exercised or not is very distinctly there. What they can do and cannot do is determined by this. Having complete mastery means you can make your energies crackle. If you simply sit here, the body will do things; you don’t have to go and do things.
If grace has to transmit itself, you need to have an appropriate body. If you do not have an appropriate body and grace descends on you big-time, you will only fuse out. Many people want big experiences but they are not willing to transform their body to be able to conduct those experiences. In yoga, you don’t chase an experience, you only prepare. If your spiritual process is something more than just talk-shop, that means you should have some mastery over your limbs.
Surya Kriya:
Today human intelligence is used in a very crippled way, constantly dipping into one’s memory bank. If your intelligence functions only from the memory that you have accumulated then you are just a recycling bin. The same thing keeps happening in many permutations and combinations.
One major aspect of spiritual process is to keep your hand out of the memory bank. Why we speak so much about karma – karma is memory – to be out of it, is because the moment you dip your hand into it, your life will become cyclical. Once your life becomes cyclical, you are just going in circles which mean that you are going nowhere. The idea is to break the cycle. If the cycle has to break, your intelligence has to become free from the accumulated memory, otherwise cycles will not be broken; cycles will be created. The more deeply you dip into this memory the cycles will become shorter and shorter and slowly lead you towards insanity.
Right now we are in the process of bringing forth a certain dimension of physical practice. Physical on the surface, but with a certain dimension of spiritual process, which we are referring to as Surya Kriya. In the last four to five months all brahmacharis have been doing Surya Kriya, they are still in the process of correcting their practice. When the practice is done, geometrically, in a hundred percent correct manner then we will initiate the Surya Kriya in a certain way and it will become a very powerful process towards physiological and psychological health as well as a tremendous spiritual possibility. It will take a certain amount of time and application and constant correction to come to that state of perfection. Only then, initiating into it will be worthwhile because it is a powerful process. It needs to be done with a certain level of competence.
Surya Kriya vs Surya Namaskar
Surya Kriya is different from Surya Namaskar in that the original practice or the real practice is Surya Kriya. It is a way of aligning yourself with the sun and it is a much more refined process which needs enormous attention in terms of the geometry of the body. Surya Namaskar is a country cousin of Surya Kriya. There is also another process called Surya Shakti, which is a far-off relative. If you want to use this system as just a physical exercise to build muscle, to become physically strong, you do Surya Shakti. If you want to build muscle, be physically fit, you want to do aerobic exercise where your heart becomes strong and you also want to have a spiritual element in it, you do Surya Namaskar. If you want a strong spiritual process in the physical process that you are doing, then you do Surya Kriya.
When we say Surya we are talking about the sun, the basic powerhouse for this planet. Everything on this planet is solar powered – all life on this planet is solar powered, including yourself. The solar cycles run in twelve and a quarter to twelve and a half years. To be able to ride these cycles is a part of your well-being. You can either ride these cycles or you can be crushed by them.
The sun, the planet and the moon have a significant role in making the human body. Surya Kriya is a way of using the sun’s cycle so that you bring your physical body to a twelve and a quarter to twelve and a half years cycle. If you observe your life carefully you will see that at certain periods of time, from the beginning of puberty, for example, there is a certain sense of repetitiveness to the situations that you face. The psychological experiences that you have, the emotional situations that you experience are cyclical. Someone may be going through a twelve year cycle; another may go through a six year cycle or three years, eighteen months, nine months or a six months cycle. If it goes anywhere below a three months cycle then that means, psychologically one is in a state where one definitely needs medical treatment.
From absolute health and balance to complete deterioration one can notice depending upon the length of cycle that is happening within oneself. Women are a little more in sync with the moon. As a result, they may not notice the solar cycle as much because they are noticing the lunar cycle much more. On the surface, for a female, the lunar cycle is playing a much more important role than the solar system. But the fundamental nature of the human body is essentially in sync with the solar cycles. So, Surya Kriya enables you to move towards a space within yourself and around yourself where circumstances are not in any way intrusive or obstructing the process of life.
After four months of meticulously correcting their practices, these brahmacharis who have been doing sadhana for eight to ten or fifteen years every day, are now beginning to understand what it takes to get the geometry of the body right. For fifteen years they have been doing Surya Namaskar and they believe they are doing it right. They are generally doing it right, but getting the geometry of the body right is not a simple thing. If you just get that right, it can download the whole cosmos. It takes a lot of work – adjusting and readjusting, to come to a point where it is just perfect. If we come to that point, then we’ll set fire to it, which is called initiation. We can set fire to the process and it will become a phenomenal practice of bringing physiological and psychological well-being on one level and becoming a powerful system to ride the cycles of the sun.
Yogasanas:
Right now, when you are trying to do hatha yoga, the biggest barrier is the limitations of your body. In fact, whatever human beings want to do, the biggest barrier is their body and mind. What should have been a stepping stone has turned into an obstacle, simply because they have not explored it considerably.
After a profound and thorough exploration of the human system, the yogic system identified 84 asanas as yogasanas, 84 postures through which you can transform your body and mind into a great possibility for your ultimate wellbeing. Most other spiritual processes talk about putting down the body because the body is an obstacle. If you want to sit and meditate, your legs tell you, “I need to stretch. I need to walk.” When we ask you in the morning to stretch your body, you say, “No, I want to rest.” If you do an asana and we ask you to stretch, you say, “No, I don’t want to stretch.” But if we ask you to sit unmoving, your body wants to stretch. Likewise, it has to eat, it has to sleep, it has to relieve itself – the body needs so many things.
Taking charge of your life
The body is a constant manifestation of various levels of compulsiveness, depending upon the type of information that has gone into the system. The information that is imprinted upon your physiological system is what we refer to as the karmic body. This information determines how much compulsiveness you suffer from, and how much freedom you naturally enjoy within yourself. In hatha yoga, we are not concerned about who our fathers and forefathers were, what kind of genetics and karmic substance we received from them, and what we have imbibed in the process of living. It does not matter what has happened until this moment – we have decided to take charge of our life.
In the Indian tradition, if you are a serious practitioner of yoga, no astrologer will want to make a prediction for you, because even he understands that you have taken charge of your life. This is what a yogasana means – you are taking charge of your life. You are transforming your body and mind into a possibility in your life. It is becoming a passage, not a block.
The process of transforming the body, changing the texture of the body, changing the fundamental information in the body, which makes it go in certain compulsive patterns, needs a certain determination, forcefulness, and adamancy. You are not willing to give in to the cycles of compulsiveness. You go the way you want to go.
Creating the right atmosphere
Ha and tha describe sun and moon. Hatha is about bringing a balance between the two. If these two dimensions are balanced within you, naturally, the body becomes a conducive place to live in for your being. If you mess up the place around you, you can move elsewhere. But if you mess up the body from within, you cannot go elsewhere until you die. As long as you live in this life, the body is the abode of your existence.
It is important that an atmosphere is conducive rather than being compulsive. If your home is a very compulsive place, you will feel suffocated. Every situation, every atmosphere is set up for a certain purpose. Your home may be set up for one kind of purpose. The ashram may be set up for another kind of purpose. An industry or a business may be set up for a different kind of purpose. Every atmosphere should serve the purpose that we have set it up for.
You must decide what purpose your body should serve. We will do the appropriate yoga for that. If your idea of a good life is being one step ahead of others, we will do one type of yoga. If you do not compare yourself to others, but you want to find your ultimate potential in terms of activity, we will do another kind of yoga. If all you want to do is dissolve into the ultimate nature of existence, we will do yet another kind of yoga. We can practice yoga in different ways.
Enhancing perception
An individual human being becomes who he or she is only because of what he or she perceives. You are who you are right now only because of what you have perceived in your life until now, and you will be who you will be only because of what you will perceive in future. The whole system of yoga is about enhancing perception.
If you hold the posture right, if your alignment is right, it matches with the cosmic alignment in some way. The 84 yogasanas represent 84 alignments, because existence as we know it now is seen as the 84th creation. The memory of these 84 creations is reflected in our body. We are trying to release and activate this memory. If one gets into these 84 postures, or if one masters a single posture and approaches the remaining 83 through that, one can know everything that has happened in creation until now, because the memory of that is within one’s system in a codified way. If this memory touches another dimension outside of yourself, it can be activated and ignited.
Yogasanas are a powerful means to connect. Do not forget, yoga means union. Union means two have become one. There are only two in existence – you and the rest of existence. In the rest of existence you may identify individual entities, but essentially, there are only two – you and the rest of existence – because there are only two dimensions of experience within you. You do not know what is up and down in this cosmos. You do not know what is forward and backward. These are all things that we have made up for convenience. Essentially, there are only two dimensions of experience – inner experiences and outer experiences.
Yoga is about creating a union between these two dimensions – inner and outer, you and the rest, you and the other. When there is no “you” and “the other,” when there is just “you” and “you,” that is yoga. Asanas are a physical form of approaching this ultimate union, because the physical body is the easiest thing to work with. If you try to come to this union with your mind, it will play too many tricks. With the body, at least you know whether it is doing it right or not, whether it is cooperating or not. If you push the mind too hard, it will make you believe all kinds of things and dump you the next day. The body is a more reliable factor. If you work with it sensibly, the yogasanas can definitely lead to ultimate union.
In the meantime, before this alignment with the ultimate happens, by getting into the postures, inner alignment happens, which will naturally create a chemistry of healthfulness, joyfulness, and blissfulness – and above all balance. Balance is something that modern societies have ignored, and they are paying a huge price for it. Whatever your intelligence, whatever your competence, education, and qualifications – if you do not have the necessary balance, you will not succeed. You will not go very far in your life.
The most important thing for people who are seeking to be successful – whether in the corporate sector, in politics, in the military, or any other field – is balance. Only if you have a balance that is not disturbed by external situations, are you capable of making use of the competence and intelligence within you. Otherwise, even the most wonderful qualities that one may have will go waste, simply because of lack of balance. Hatha yoga brings this balance.
Bhuta Shuddhi – The Fundamental Yogic Practice:
What you call as “my body” is just a manifestation of five elements – earth, water, fire, air and akasha (space). If you know how to organize these five elements properly within yourself, then there is nothing more to life. In terms of health, wellbeing, perception, knowing and enlightenment, everything is handled if you know how to keep these five elements properly. The most fundamental practice in the Yogic system, which is the basis of everything else that we are doing, is called bhuta shuddhi. “Bhuta” refers to the pancha bhutas or the five elements. “Shuddhi” means to cleanse that. If you learn to cleanse the five elements in the system, that is all there is. In terms of spiritual practices, whether you do yama, niyama, pranayama, asana, dharana, dhyana, samadhi or shoonya, essentially all of it is coming from the fundamentals of bhuta shuddhi. All other Yogic practices are an extract from the pancha bhuta system of Yoga.
If you cleanse the elements, you will live a wonderful life. But if you are beyond that, the best thing is to forget about living a beautiful life and just transcend life, because living a beautiful life is a more complex situation than transcending. Transcending means to go beyond it. What is beyond is not bothered by so many complexities of the physicality. But if you want to be in the physical and still above it, that takes a little more mastery over the physical. If you have no mastery over the physical, you will get enslaved to the physical.
If you do a certain level of cleansing for the elements, then you attain to what is called bhuta siddhi, which means you have mastery over the elements. Once you have mastery over the elements, you not only have mastery over the body and mind, but over the very creation.
The Significance of Bhuta Shuddhi or Cleansing the Five Elements
Everyone has some kind of capability with the elements, otherwise you would not even live a normal life. How well organized the five elements are in your system decides how firm, stable and organically strong this body is. There is a whole system of practices to take charge of the five elements within you. Some are direct, others are roundabout. Bhuta shuddhi can be practiced in a most simplistic way or in a highly sophisticated way. Or if you do not know how to do it yourself, someone can perform something which everyone can benefit from. There are bhuta shuddhi rituals such as the Pancha Bhuta Kriya happening in the Dhyanalinga every month. If you do not know how to do it, someone else will do it; you just sit there in the presence and benefit from that.
These elements are the basis of your creation. If you have even a minor mastery over them, you will start living in ways that other people think is magical. But there is nothing magical about it. Right now, let us say you drink water. The water does not look like you or resemble you, but if you drink this, it becomes you. This itself is magical. Your disease got cured; that is not a miracle. This water becoming you is a phenomenal miracle. Once you are capable of performing this miracle, you should be capable of many other minor things like fixing an ailment or fixing something that you damaged – because you are creating the whole body from inside using the four elements. Unfortunately, it is happening unconsciously. One can bring consciousness to how these four elements are becoming the human body.
Bhuta shuddhi means you want to lose yourself. It does not matter whether it is good, bad, ugly or beautiful, you want to lose everything that you have built so that the Creator’s creation will stand up and shine within you. It will take a certain amount of work. The bhuta shuddhi that we teach is very basic. If you want to do more serious forms of bhuta shuddhi, it is not something that you do on the side; it becomes your entire life. But even if you do a very minor version of bhuta shuddhi, you will see the change that happens in you is permanent. There is no tendency to fall back, and that is important. Otherwise, everyone changes for three days and again they fall back into the rut. That will not happen when you assist whatever else you are doing with the bhuta shuddhi practice.
If you keep up the bhuta shuddhi practice, however small the practice is, you will see as time progresses, its impact is undeniable. Suppose you do six months of Yogasanas and give it up for one year; everything will be back as it was. If you do a powerful process like Shakti Chalana Kriya, its impact will be there, but if you do not do it for a certain period of time, it will turn back again. You do Shoonya meditation for some time and if you do not do it for a certain period of time, it will slowly turn back. But that is not the nature of bhuta shuddhi. If you do bhuta shuddhi, nothing seems to be happening because it is very fundamental and slow. But as long as you hold this body, it stays with you. It will not go because it is on a very fundamental level. That is the significance of bhuta shuddhi. If you do not hold a profession and if you do not have family either, then we can start a more serious form of bhuta shuddhi because it will take a lot of time.