Week 4: Svadyaya

 

स्वद्यय

Love not what you are, but what you may become.

—Cervantes

Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power. - Tao Te Ching

You become what you think about all day long.

—Ralph Waldo Emrson

I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.
—Michel de Montaigne

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
—William Butler Yeats

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. 

— Carl Jung

All that is best for us comes of itself into our hands--but if we strive to overtake it, it perpetually eludes us.
—Ananda Coomaraswamy

The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within.
 — Mahatma Gandhi
  
Pranayama Practice Week 4

Week Three: Tapas

 तपस्

 Dear Sadhakas, 
This week we will focus on tapas as a foundation of our sadhana.
Sadhana or practice is defined as:

Kriya yoga—the activity and practice of yoga and this is broken into in three distinct practices that overlap and support each other. :

1. tapas (discipline, stoking the internal fire producing the will to transform, clarifying body and mind)

2. svadyaya (unflinching self-reflection and sincere study)

3. Isvara pranidhana (awareness and focus on something greater than yourself, laying the fruit of your actions at the foot of something larger than your own desires.)

Our practice in the asana (postures) and praynayama (mindful breathing practice) serves as a foundation for all three parts of kriya yoga. Asana directly impacts the anamaya kosha (the physical diminsion) and praynayama impacts the pranamaya kosha (the vital energies). However all the elements of self are being challanged, changed and supported by these practices, particularly when they are undertaken on a daily basis and with sincere effort towards learning and growing. In other words as the sadhana is established, the tapas is stimulated. This stimulates greater self-reflection that reveals the awareness of an newly awakened features of our consciousness. 

Readings for Week 3

Tapas: From Yoga Sutras 
 Emmet Fox's 7 Day Mental Diet 

Repetition is based on body rhythms, so we identify with the heartbeat, or with walking, or with breathing.

—Karlheinz Stockhausen

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.

—Lao Tzu

 

Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay.
—Simone de Beauvoir
 

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
—Pierre Teillard de Chardin

It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.
—Frederick Douglass

So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloudshadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Week One: Atha

साधना
 
Welcome sishyas (students), 

I am so glad that you have decided to deepen your yoga practice —your sadhana. 
Formalizing the yoga and committing to a daily practice can be a very transformative experience.
I urge you to keep a record of your journey. Every day write in a small notebook, or journal to register your thoughts and impressions.  It may prove to be an invaluable resource to you as you walk along this road of change and growth. 

This site is where you will find  readings, images and quotes for inspiration during your  Sadhana Course at Loka Yoga. 

I bow to your studentship (adhikara) and your wish to grow in yoga through self study (svadyaya)
Yours in Yoga.
Alice

 

Below are links to the readings for the first two weeks of your Sadhana 

 Kriya Yoga 
Taittiriya Upanisads  

Morning Asana 

Evening Asana

Pranayama Practice

Sadhana aims at bringing about a radical change in the quality of life so that it permanently becomes an expression of the Truth in the eternal NOW. Sadhana is spiritually fruitful if it succeeds in bringing the life of the individual in tune with the divine purpose, which is to enable everyone to enjoy consciously the God-state.
 — Meher Baba

 

Yoga is primarily a practice intended to make someone wiser, more able to understand things than they were before. If asanas help in this, terrific! In not, then some other means can be found instead. The goal is always bhakti, or to put it in my father's words, to approach the highest intelligence, namely, God. 

—TKV Desikachar, The Heart of Yoga (Interview with Mark Whitwell)

Sādhanā is a discipline undertaken in the pursuit of a goal. Abhyāsa is repeated practice performed with observation and reflection. Kriyā, or action, also implies perfect execution with study and investigation. Therefore, sādhanā, abhyāsa, and kriyā all mean one and the same thing. A sādhaka, or practitioner, is one who skillfully applies...mind and intelligence in practice towards a spiritual goal. 
—Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, B.K.S. Iyengar Commentary

“In learning a language, when from mere words we reach the laws of words, we have gained a great deal. But if we stop at that point and concern ourselves only with the marvels of the formation of a language, seeking the hidden reason of all its apparent caprices, we do not reach that end, for grammar is not literature… When we come to literature, we find that, though it conforms to the rules of grammar, it is yet a thing of joy; it is freedom itself. The beauty of a poem is bound by strict laws, yet it transcends them. The laws are its wings. They do not keep it weighed down. They carry it to freedom. Its form is in law, but its spirit is in beauty. Law is the first step toward freedom, and beauty is the complete liberation which stands on the pedestal of law. Beauty harmonizes in itself the limit and the beyond – the law and the liberty.”
—Rabindranath Tagore, Sadhana

In the spiritual field it is not possible to maintain an unbridgeable gulf between Sadhana and the end sought through it. This gives rise to the fundamental paradox that, in the spiritual field, the practising of a Sadhana in itself amounts to a partial participation in the goal.

—Meher Baba

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Week Two: Avidya

अविद्य

   

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods, like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue. 
—Ralph Waldo Emerson  

 

Nourishing the Physical 1

Nourishing the Physical pg. 2

Nourishing the Physical pg. 3

Nourishing the Physical pg.4

Pranayama for Week 2  

Reading

Foundations of a Yoga Practice byTKV Desikachar

 

 

There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson 

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.

― T.S. Elliot

The world only goes round by misunderstanding.

Charles Baudelaire

Like the appearance of silver in mother of pearl, the world seems real until the Self, the underlying reality, is realized.

—Shankara

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

—Voltaire 

some offer the outgoing breath to the incoming breath and the incoming breath to the outgoing breath; in this way checking the flow of both the incoming and the outgoing breath, they practice breath control with devotion...

Bhagavad Gita 4:28

 

तपःस्वाध्यायेश्वरप्रणिधानानि क्रियायोगः॥१॥

tapah svadyaya isvara pranidhana kriya yogah