An eminent yoga teacher, recognized by Time magazine as one of the greatest influences on the modern world, encourages us to treat our body as a precious, subtle tool for tuning our soul.
“For the first time I was in Russia twenty years ago, at the invitation of the government, I came to teach yoga, to help people gain health without the help of drugs. Even then I found here a great interest in this teaching and in my method; Since then, I have had many Russian students who have been trained with us in India, in Pune. And over the past twenty years, yoga has gained even more followers here.
The fact is that your people turned out to be very receptive to yoga. In their inner make-up, Indians and Russians are very similar, their emotional essence is very close. Both of them are internally different from people of the Western formation, Europeans and Americans, who are too intellectually oriented and believe that even psycho-emotional problems can be solved with the help of logic. You are also distinguished by a unique position, a unique quality: the sensitive heart of the East and the reasonable brain of the West — this is a very good combination, which I see only in Russia.
Heart and intellect meet here, can work in synergy — and this is a wonderful quality. Such a feature of the inner essence gives your people a certain advantage in understanding yoga and using its possibilities to improve their lives.
The main thing to understand is that our body is a temple in which the soul lives. If you treat your body badly, treat it incorrectly, illnesses and emotional problems will come. Western medicine has long known that mental suffering can lead to illness in the body. And yoga tells us that this principle also works in the opposite direction: by influencing the body, working with it, you can heal not only the body shell, but also the injuries of the soul. The body is our treasure, a subtle tool for tuning the soul.
All the treasures of the human being are within us, one might say, hidden under the skin, inside our flesh. The fibers of our soul are dispersed, distributed within this bodily shell. In the process of building asanas (yogic postures), bones, flesh, joints, fibers, ligaments are included in the work. Trying to maintain balance, we adjust the position of the body and limbs with an effort of will, adding observation of the knees, feet, ankles, soles of the feet, fingers, and so on — our attention penetrates everywhere. In asana, our mind covers the whole body, literally dissolving in every cell and forming a common field of sensitivity, awareness. Thus, when you do asanas, your mind inevitably turns inward, moving closer and closer to the inner Self. The nerves calm down, the brain relaxes, the lungs expand. So the practice of yoga reduces the stress that permeates our mind — and this is especially important for modern man.
Yoga is designed to stabilize the emotional and intellectual state of a person, resulting in calmness and peace of mind, well-being, satisfaction with life — in a word, everything that ordinary people understand as happiness. However, happiness and health are just by-products of yoga, not its goal. Yoga is not just gymnastics. Thanks to practice, the separation disappears, the speculative boundary between our bodily nature and spirituality dissolves, the dualism between the material body and the soul disappears. Integrity is achieved.
These interpenetrating components of our being — material and non-material — naturally harmonize. Perhaps these consequences of yoga practice are not obvious to an outsider; for people who have never practiced, it probably looks like just a sequence of physical exercises. This is where the parable about the child and the ocean comes to my mind: we know that great riches are hidden in the depths of the waters, but if you ask a small child to describe the ocean, he will simply say: “It is salty.” But this will be only a description of one of its obvious properties, and by no means the truth.
Yoga helps to turn the instinctive wisdom of the body into intuitive knowledge. It is given to us so that, starting from the outer, physical body and the mind directed outward, we move towards the inner «I». To the true — divine — nature of man.