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W hen I left India and came to Europe and America a half century ago, open-mouthed audiences gaped at the presentation of yogasana positions, seeing them as some exotic form of contortionism. These very same asanas have now been embraced by many millions of people throughout the world, and their physical and therapeutic benefits are widely acknowledged. This in itself is an extraordinary transformation, as yoga has lit a fire in the hearts of so many.
I set off in yoga seventy years ago when ridicule, rejection, and outright condemnation were the lot of a seeker through yoga even in its native land of India. Indeed, if I had become a sadhu, a mendicant holy man, wandering the great trunk roads of British India, begging bowl in hand, I would have met with less derision and won more respect. At one time, I was asked to become a sannyasin and renounce the world, but I declined. I wanted to live as an ordinary householder with all the trials and tribulations of life and to take my yoga practice to average people who share with me the common life of work, marriage, and children. I was blessed with all three, including a long and joyous marriage to my beloved late wife, Ramamani, children, and grandchildren.
The life of a householder is difficult, and it always has been. Most of us encounter hardship and suffering, and many are plagued by physical and emotional pain, stress, sadness, loneliness, and anxiety. While we often think of these as the problems caused by the demands of modern life, human life has always had the same hardships and the same challenges—making a living, raising a family, and finding meaning and purpose.
These have always and will always be the challenges that we humans face. As animals, we walk the earth. As bearers of a divine essence, we are among the stars. As human beings, we are caught in the middle, seeking to reconcile the paradox of how to make our way upon the earth while striving for something more permanent and more profound. So many seek this greater Truth in the heavens, but it lies much closer than the clouds. It is within us and can be found by anyone on the Inward Journey.
What most people want is the same. Most people simply want physical and mental health, understanding and wisdom, and peace and freedom. Often our means of pursuing these basic human needs come apart at the seams, as we are pulled by the different and often competing demands of human life. Yoga, as it was understood by its sages, is designed to satisfy all these human needs in a comprehensive, seamless whole. Its goal is nothing less than to attain the integrity of oneness—oneness with ourselves and as a consequence oneness with all that lies beyond ourselves. We become the harmonious microcosm in the universal macrocosm. Oneness, what I often call integration, is the foundation for wholeness, inner peace, and ultimate freedom.
Yoga allows you to rediscover a sense of wholeness in your life, where you do not feel like you are constantly trying to fit the broken pieces together. Yoga allows you to find an inner peace that is not ruffled and riled by the endless stresses and struggles of life. Yoga allows you to find a new kind of freedom that you may not have known even existed. To a yogi, freedom implies not being battered by the dualities of life, its ups and downs, its pleasures and its suffering. It implies equanimity and ultimately that there is an inner serene core of one’s being that is never out of touch with the unchanging, eternal infinite.
As I have said already, anyone can embark on the Inward Journey. Life itself seeks fulfillment as plants seek the sunlight. The Universe did not create Life in the hope that the failure of the majority would underscore the success of the few. Spiritually at least, we live in a democracy, an equal opportunity society.
Yoga is not meant to be a religion or a dogma for any one culture. While yoga sprang from the soil of India, it is meant as a universal path, a way open to all regardless of their birth and background. Patanjali used the expression sarvabhauma —universal—some 2,500 years ago. We are all human beings, but we have been taught to think of ourselves as Westerners or Easterners. If we were left to ourselves, we would simply be individual human beings—no Africans, no Indians, no Europeans, no Americans. Coming from India, I inevitably developed certain Indian characteristics adopted from the culture in which I was nurtured. We all do this. There is no difference in the soul—what I call the “Seer.” The difference comes only between the “garments” of the seer—the ideas about our selves that we wear. Break them. Do not feed them with divisive ideas. That is what yoga teaches. When you and I meet together, we forget ourselves—our cultures and classes. There are no divisions, and we talk mind to mind, soul to soul. We are no different in our deepest needs. We are all human.
Yoga recognizes that the way our bodies and minds work has changed very little over the millennia. The way we function inside our skin is not susceptible to differ either in time or from place to place. In the functioning of our minds, in our way of relating to each other, there are inherent stresses, like geological fault lines that, left unaddressed, will always cause things to go wrong, whether individually or collectively. The whole thrust of the yogic philosophical and scientific inquiry has therefore been to examine the nature of being, with a view to learning to respond to the stresses of life without so many tremors and troubles.
Yoga does not look on greed, violence, sloth, excess, pride, lust, and fear as ineradicable forms of original sin that exist to wreck our happiness—or indeed on which to found our happiness. They are seen as natural, if unwelcome, manifestations of the human disposition and predicament that are to be solved, not suppressed or denied. Our flawed mechanisms of perception and thought are not a cause for grief (though they bring us grief), but an opportunity to evolve, for an internal evolution of consciousness that will also make possible in a sustainable form our aspirations toward what we call individual success and global progress.
Yoga is the rule book for playing the game of Life, but in this game no one needs to lose. It is tough, and you need to train hard. It requires the willingness to think for yourself, to observe and correct, and to surmount occasional setbacks. It demands honesty, sustained application, and above all love in your heart. If you are interested to understand what it means to be a human being, placed between earth and sky, if you are interested in where you come from and where you will be able to go, if you want happiness and long for freedom, then you have already begun to take the first steps toward the journey inward.
The rules of nature cannot be bent. They are impersonal and implacable. But we do play with them. By accepting nature’s challenge and joining the game, we find ourselves on a windswept and exciting journey that will pay benefits commensurate to the time and effort we put in— the lowest being our ability to tie our own shoelaces when we are eighty and the highest being the opportunity to taste the essence of life itself.
Most of those who begin to practice yogasana, the poses of yoga, do so for practical and often physical reasons. Perhaps it is for some medical problem such as a bad back, a sports injury, high blood pressure, or arthritis. Or perhaps it is as a result of a broader concern to do with achieving a better lifestyle or coping with stress, weight problems, or addiction. Very few people begin yoga because they believe it will be a way to achieve spiritual enlightenment, and indeed a good number may be quite skeptical about the whole idea of spiritual self-realization. Actually, this is not a bad thing because it means most of the people who come to yoga are practical people who have practical problems and aims—people who are grounded in the ways and means of life, people who are sensible.
When I set off in yoga, I also had no understanding of the greater glory of yoga. I too was seeking its physical benefits, and it was these that truly saved my life. When I say that yoga saved my life, I am not exaggerating. It was yoga that gave me a new birth with health from illness and firmness from infirmity.
At the time of my birth, in December 1918, India, like so many countries, was devastated by a major world epidemic of influenza. My mother, Sheshamma, was herself in the grip of the disease at the time when she was pregnant with me, and as a result, I was born very sickly. My arms were thin, my legs were spindly, and my stomach protruded in an ungainly manner. So frail was I, in fact, that I was not expected to survive. My head used to hang down, and I had to lift it with great effort. My head was disproportionately large to the rest of my body, and my brothers and sisters often teased me. I was the eleventh child of thirteen, although only ten survived.
This frailty and sickliness remained with me throughout my early years. As a boy, I suffered from numerous ailments, including frequent bouts of malaria, typhoid, and tuberculosis. My poor health was matched, as it often is when one is sick, by my poor mood. A deep melancholy often overtook me, and at times I asked myself whether life was worth the trouble of living.
I grew up in the village of Bellur in the Kolar District of the southern Indian state of Karnataka, a small farming community of some 500 people, making a living by cultivating rice, millet, and a few vegetables. My family was better off than many, however, since my father had inherited a small plot of land and also drew a State salary for acting as a schoolmaster in a somewhat larger village a short distance away. Bellur itself did not at the time have a school of its own.
When I was five years old, my family moved from Bellur to Bangalore. My father had suffered from appendicitis since he was a child and had not received any treatment for it. Shortly before my ninth birthday, the appendicitis, which had flared up once again, proved fatal. From his sick bed, my father called me and told me that he would die when I was nearing nine as his father had died when he was nearing nine. He also told me that he had struggled very hard in his youth and that I would struggle very hard in mine, but eventually I would lead a happy life. I daresay my father’s prophecy came true both in the struggle and in the happiness. At the time a great vacuum was left in my family, and there was no strong guiding hand to help me through my sickness and my schooling. As often as not, I missed school through illness, and I fell behind in my studies.
Despite my father’s being a schoolteacher, my family were Brahmins—members of the priestly caste in India who are born to a life of religious duty. Typically, a Brahmin will earn a living through offerings made by people, through payment for the performance of religious ceremonies, and perhaps through the patronage of a wealthy or aristocratic family or individual. In accordance with Indian tradition, Brahmins generally marry into other Brahmin families, through arranged marriages. And so my sister was given in marriage at the age of eleven to a distant relative of ours, Shriman T. Krishnamacharya. This was an excellent match, as he was a venerable and revered scholar of both philosophy and Sanskrit. After completing his academic studies, Krishnamacharya had spent many further years in the Himalayan Mountains near the border of Nepal with Tibet, pursuing the study of yoga under the tutelage of Shri Ramamohana Brahmachari.
At this time, Maharajas, Indian Kings, lived in great fortresses, riding out on their elephants to hunt tigers in personal fiefdoms larger than many European countries. The Maharaja of Mysore heard of my brother-in-law’s scholarship and prowess in yoga and took a great interest in him. The Maharaja invited my brother-in-law to teach in his Sanskrit college, and later to set up a school of yoga, at his magnificent Jaganmohan Palace. The Maharaja would from time to time also ask Krishnamacharya to travel to other cities to spread the message of yoga to a broader public. It was during one such journey in 1934, when I was some fourteen years old, that my brother-in-law asked me to come from Bangalore to Mysore and spend some time with his wife (my sister) and her family while he was away. On my brother-in-law’s return, when I asked to be allowed to go back to my mother and to my other brothers and sisters, he proposed instead that I should stay in Mysore working on yoga to improve my health.
Seeing that the general state of my health was so poor, my brother-in-law recommended a stiff regime of yoga practice to knock me into shape and strengthen me up to face life’s trials and challenges as I approached adulthood. If my brother-in-law also had an eye to my deeper spiritual or personal development, he did not say so at the time. The situation seemed right and the time propitious, and I embarked upon my training at my brother-in-law’s yoga school.
This was to be the major turning point in my life—the moment when destiny came to meet me, and I had the opportunity to embrace it or to turn away. Like for so many people, these pivotal moments pass with no great fanfare, but instead become the starting point for years of steady work and growth. So it was that my brother-in-law, Shriman T. Krishnamacharya, became my revered teacher and guru and took the place of my mother and late father as my effective guardian.
One of the duties I was often called upon to perform during this period of my life was to give demonstrations of yoga for the Maharaja’s court and for visiting dignitaries and guests. It was my guru’s duty to provide for the edification and amusement of the Maharaja’s entourage by putting his students—of whom I was one of the youngest—through their paces and showing off their ability to stretch and bend their bodies into the most impressive and astonishing postures. I pushed myself to the limits in my practice in order to do my duty to my teacher and guardian and to satisfy his demanding expectations.
At eighteen, I was sent to Pune to spread the teaching of yoga. There I did not possess the language nor have community, family, friends, or even safe employment. At the time all I had was my practice of asana, of yoga postures—not even the breathing practices of pranayama, not texts, not yoga philosophy.
I embarked on the practice of asana as a man might set off to sail the world in a craft he could barely handle, clinging to it for dear life and finding only solace from the stars. Although I knew that others had sailed the world before me, I did not have their maps. It was a voyage of discovery. In time I came across some maps, usually charted some hundreds or thousands of years before, and found that my discoveries corresponded with and confirmed theirs. I continued, heartened and encouraged, to see if I too could make their distant landfalls and better learn how to handle my ship. I wanted precisely to chart every coastline, measure the depth of every sea, happen on beautiful unknown islands, and record each perilous hidden reef or tidal current that threatens our navigation of the ocean of life.
In this way, body became my first instrument to know what yoga is. The slow process of refinement started then and continues in my practice to this day. In the process yogasana brought tremendous physical benefits and helped me to grow from a sickly child into a reasonably fit and agile young man. My own body was the laboratory, in which I saw the health benefits of yoga, but I could already see that yoga would have as many benefits for my head and heart as it did for my body. It would be impossible to overestimate the gratitude I bear to this great subject that saved and uplifted me.
This book is about Life. It is an attempt to light the way for you and other spiritual seekers. It aims to map out a path that all may follow. It offers advice, methods, and a philosophical framework at a level that even a newcomer to the practice of yoga may grasp. It does not offer shortcuts or vain promises to the gullible. It has taken me more than seventy years of constant application to reach where I am today. That does not mean that you need seventy years to reap the rewards of yoga practice. Yoga brings gifts from your very first day. These benefits can be experienced even by raw beginners, who feel something beginning to happen at a deep level in their bodies, in their minds, and even in their souls. Some describe the first gifts as a new feeling of lightness or calm or joy.
The miracle is that after seventy years, these gifts are still increasing for me. The benefits of practice cannot always be anticipated. When they come, it is so often as unexpected bounty in forms one had not expected. But if you think that learning to touch your toes or even stand on your head is the whole of yoga, you have missed most of its bounty, most of its blessings, and most of its beauty.
Yoga releases the creative potential of Life. It does this by establishing a structure for self-realization, by showing how we can progress along the journey, and by opening a sacred vision of the Ultimate, of our Divine Origin, and final Destiny. The Light that yoga sheds on Life is something special. It is transformative. It does not just change the way we see things; it transforms the person who sees. It brings knowledge and elevates it to wisdom.
The Light on Life we envisage here is unadulterated insight, pure truth ( satya ), which, allied to non-violence, was the guiding principle of Mahatma Gandhi and changed the world for all its inhabitants.
Socrates admonished one to know thy self. To know oneself is to know one’s body, mind, and soul. Yoga, I often say, is like music. The rhythm of the body, the melody of the mind, and the harmony of the soul create the symphony of life. The Inward Journey will allow you to explore and to integrate each of these aspects of your being. From your physical body, you will journey inward to discover your “subtle bodies”—your energy body, where breath and emotions reside; your mental body, where thoughts and obsessions can be mastered; your intellectual body, where intelligence and wisdom can be found; and your divine body, where the Universal Soul can be glimpsed. In the next chapter, we will understand this ancient yogic mapping of the layers of our being. Before we will look at each layer in its own chapter, we must first deepen our understanding of this Inward Journey and how it incorporates the traditional eight limbs or petals of yoga. We must also come to see the relationship between nature and soul; yoga does not reject one for the other but sees them as inseparably joined like earth and sky are joined on the horizon.
You do not need to seek freedom in some distant land, for it exists within your own body, heart, mind, and soul. Illuminated emancipation, freedom, unalloyed and untainted bliss await you, but you must choose to embark on the Inward Journey to discover it.