As human beings, our perception of external events always has an internal basis. Whatever we are focused on or give priority to, we will tend to see patterns related to that in the external world. Hence a doctor who sees symptoms of patients all day will see them even when not working. An architect will see design faults even when not actively looking at buildings. We are constantly bombarded with stimuli from outside and as a survival mechanism the brain tries to filter out irrelevant information to make better decisions.

In the context of the spiritual path it means that we may start ascribing divine meaning to events which may just be happenstance. When I first started on this path, I faced this difficulty several times. An event which would have passed unnoticed by me earlier, now had a divine reason. These delusions are a trick of the ego to try and ensure it remains intact as the sovereign and master of the self. As Guruji says “The veil of maya is even more illusory when one walks on this path. One can be lost in this for years and feel that they are progressing.”

I have a few hypotheses on why this phenomenon occurs. I am not sure if they are correct but they do seem logical. The first one is that it is a case of old wine in a new bottle. While the perspective has shifted from a worldly goal to a spiritual one – the act is still one of chase or conquest or achievement. Spirituality is something to be attained and ‘I’ will attain it. The ‘I’ is still running the show and interpreting events to suit itself. The second is that it is an attempt made by the ego to survive. The ego can really delude us. By pretending to drop the worldly identity, the ego now wears the garb of a spiritual person. Hence, everything will now be interpreted in the spiritual paradigm to ensure that this new identity gets food to grow big and strong. The third could be that of the pendulum effect. Someone who has extreme views on one side will go to the other extreme at first before settling down in equilibrium position. Thus the prevalent phenomenon of the fanaticism of the newly converted.

I am not sure what happened in my case, it may have been a mix of all the three. It is not a healthy attitude to have on this path. It is easy to get astray with wayward delusions and visions. I am not saying that there are no genuine visions, darshans or experiences; but many a times it is the product of an overactive imagination. It would possibly take many years of sadhana before we can be at a level to ascertain the difference between a darshan and a figment of our imagination. Another reason why it is best to have no expectations in sadhana and just be in sharanagati to the Guru.

A big obstacle on the path of yoga is the feeling that one does not need supervision. I have had firsthand experience of what happens when one does unsupervised yoga and it is not something I would want to repeat. In our culture, yogic knowledge is always transmitted from Guru to shishya in a parampara. Nowadays, the cultural trend of the ‘individual’ at the centre of things has invaded us in India and we feel that we ‘know-it-all’ and no one can tell us otherwise. The access to information through tools like the internet has created a further consolidation of that belief. I am sure we have all at some point googled symptoms and come up diagnoses for our ailments which we then used to argue with our doctors.

This belief does get reinforced if one is successful. I had learnt guitar through youtube and books and had become reasonably good at it. When I got into strength training, I designed my strength training plan, learnt the key lifts like the squat,deadlift and overhead press on my own. I also had success with a diet plan I had come up with basis my research from books and articles. With reasonable success through self-study and application the previous areas, I was convinced Yoga would also prove to be similar.

I had learnt some asanas from a Bihar School of Yoga book. Therein was a section which talked about how the ‘Vipreet Karani‘ asana could help in pushing the energy upward. There were many other books which talked of how without the ascension of kundalini, nothing can happen and how it was the most fantastic experience for a human being. There were also several online blogs (mostly american) who talked about experimenting with your yoga practice to improve it further. I now felt why not experiment with the asanas sequence, do Vipreet Karani for a longer duration and see if I can enhance the feeling of energy and try and push the kundalini up. Now those who have taught yoga know that there is a particular sequence of these asanas which needs to be maintained otherwise there can be untoward effects.

I had heard of that warning but did not heed it. A few days after starting this ‘experiment’, I started feeling feverish during the middle of the day. It was a fever where my insides were burning but the skin was cool. I had no idea what had happened but I could guess it was due to the improper yoga practice. I went through the day in a weak daze and being anxious about having done some permanent nerve damage. Medicines for fever prescribed by the doctor also did not work. It took 3 days for me to get back to normal. I then forswore all books on yoga instruction and decided that without a Guru I will not do anything.

With my current practices, I abide by whatever Guruji says. Each of the practices is very potent energetically and I have been tempted to think “Oh 5 minutes of this makes me feel so good, then 10 minutes will be even better”. However, my previous experience has made me very wary and I no longer want to play with fire . There is only certain amount of energy the system can handle safely and it will take time and practice to get it to a stage where it can take in more. It is best not to be in a hurry and anyway I have found that the journey itself is the reward.

I remember when I was on my quest to lose weight there were times when I had stayed on course with my diet and exercise regime for many weeks and then suddenly I would eat a piece of chocolate and that would justify a few days of cheating on the diet. This was very frustrating for me as it would be a case of two steps forward one step back. I then realized that the mind can rationalize anything and it takes a lot of effort to reign in the senses.

When something as mundane as weight loss takes so much effort, it is not difficult to imagine the sheer strength of will needed on the spiritual path. I have found it quite difficult to be relentless in my conviction day in and day out. The mind is a master trickster and plays so many different games that it is easy to go astray. Especially when one is used to immediate gratification in the material world, trying to be disciplined on the spiritual path can sway the best of us. I am still not there yet in terms of willpower but am sharing what has been working for me.

The first has been creating a routine of doing the practices in the morning after waking up. No matter where I was, I did them. I even woke up at 2:00 am to do the practices before catching an early morning flight. Although many a times I used to be tired and the sessions were far from ideal, it created a pattern of making it ingrained into my system – almost like brushing my teeth. I have found that doing important things in the morning is always good. If I put off something to the end of the day, I would end up skipping a few days. Once that happened, subconsciously it would get reinforced that the activity was not so important. This would eventually lead to it being skipped regularly.

The second thing was creating regularity in dietary habits. In one of my earlier posts, I have talked about the role of food in sadhana. I experimented and found food choices which worked for me. There were several parameters I looked at – taste, time to prepare, availability of ingredients, ease of digestion. I did some experimentation and found some staple easy to make recipes which worked optimally for me. Then I just started eating them in rotation. It can sound a bit boring but it works well. Food cannot be neglected as eating spicy,oily,heavy food can really disturb the mind, lead to dullness, more poor choices and disrupt days of progress.

The third is creating small internalized rituals of devotion to the Guru. The mind can get influenced with time and I am using this loophole by attempting to reprogram it. Thinking of the Guru, doing internal chants in his praise, dedicating the first morsel of food every meal, remembering him as the last thing before sleeping and first upon waking up will slowly make the mind feel that the Guru is extremely important. Hence one will start valuing the Guru’s words more and more. This along with the experiences from practices, ahara shuddhi can create a positive cocoon and the probability of straying from the path gets reduced.

I have not mentioned Gurukripa or Guru’s grace as a support for willpower as I have only focused in this post on what is in my control. Gurukripa is the most essential aspect in the spiritual growth of a shishya. However, I do not understand how it works and cannot explain it. I just know that it is the most potent accelerant on the path.

“Sit quietly and observe the breath”, I remember this as being my first instruction on meditation given to me during a basic yoga course I attended when I was in school. Although it sounded simple, it was the hardest thing I had ever done. The mind ran here and there and my body was quivering being unaccustomed to sitting still. It felt so unnatural that I gave up on meditation from that day onward. It took me many years and several ounces of world weariness before I was ready to give it another try.

When I finally decided to explore meditation and eastern wisdom, I went to my preferred mode of knowledge – books. Little did I know the immense limitation inherent in the written word to explain an experiental construct. The more books I read, the more confused I became. Buddhist schools talked about focussing on the breath, sitting still and expecting nothing. Books like Vijnanabhairava Tantra gave 112 ways of meditating. Western interpretations of ancient eastern scriptures on meditation muddled the stream further. Mindfulness has been propounded by several new age western teachers. Osho talked of meditation as just being unoccupied. So while scriptures like the Upanishads spoke of the illuminative experiences and the grandeur of the infinite, I had no idea on how to experience it….

The first breakthrough in meditation happened or rather the first time I went into a meditative state happened for me in Isha’s Shoonya program. It also broke a few of the misconceptions I had about meditation. The first misconception that I had was that meditation requires one to sit with a straight,erect spine in a difficult to do asana like padmasana or siddhasana. In Shoonya, one could even sit on a chair and meditate. The second misconception was that meditation was all about continuous uninterrupted awareness of something – either breath or a chosen deity or a mantra.

While the meditative states I experienced through Shoonya were intense on occasion, they were irregular and not very long. The really deep and intense meditative states started happening regularly once I started doing practices outlined by Guruji. In fact he never told me to sit separately for meditation. I remember asking upon first meeting him “Guruji, Dhyan kaise karte hain?” He just gave an enigmatic smile and said “Ho jaega“. All the books I had read were thrown out of the window with that one statement. He just told me “Do these few practices and sit quietly for some time after that”. I used to sit quietly on the sofa after the practices and within a few days I started slipping into meditative states which were so powerful that they started reshaping my actions during the rest of the day.

If I were to ever examine the most important thing on this path which has helped in motivating me to continue onward, it is these deep states of meditation. They are like the reward for following the Guru’s instructions and the rules of the path properly. Talk about positive reinforcement !! I feel so relaxed, energized and in tune with my true self after these sessions, that there is nothing in the world to compare them to. All the wealth in the world pales in comparison to that eternal nectar that lies within. The most funny thing however is that Guruji says this is prarambhik avastha (beginner’s stage) of meditation. I wonder what happens in the next stages…

In my experience the most powerful and sustained personality changes for me have happened when I was not really aware of them happening. They happened below the surface of my conscious mind, sparked by an idea or an inspiration taking root in the unseen,murky depths of my subconscious mind. Many of us feel that the personality is an unchanging rigid entity, whereas it is quite the opposite. There is constant change beneath the surface, new ideas and experiences which sometimes tear down or reinforce the aspect of one’s personality. While there are certain preferences which we may have towards certain things from childhood, it is quite possible to reprogram the same. Most of the time it happens unconsciously, e.g. when certain verbal or body language tics get imprinted on us from someone else without our knowledge. Sometimes it may happen as a conscious choice e.g. when we role model cues from a sportsperson or an actor. Trauma can also sometimes play a role in the same.The sum total of all these things result in what we know as personality.

In this post I will share from my experience and my understanding on how I feel that Kriya Yoga can help in making this change a conscious and simple process. Although trying to elaborate on an experiential subject like this is fraught with limitations, I will try and use an analogy to illustrate my understanding.

From psychology we know that thoughts become actions and actions over time become habits. I had a very unproductive habit of worrying about the past and future. This while useful many times in the context of work was affecting my quality of life as my mind used to always be anxious. Sometimes it would be anxiety about where I stand amongst my peers and sometimes it would be worrying about the reaction from my manager. This anxiety was unproductive and my mind used to run in loops and end up chasing its own tail. Anxiety became ingrained in my personality. Things came to such a pass that I was anxious about being anxious!!

Today I can say that there are only a few instances where I feel anxious and that too is more of a controlled and planned anxiety to suit the tasks I am trying to do. This has happened so under the surface and so gradually that I did not even know when I stopped worrying about things. All of us are constantly fretting and worrying about doing and not just being. It is like a jar of muddy water which is continuously getting stirred in the hope that it becomes clear. All that is needed to let is be for some time and the sediment settles at the bottom. The Guru helps facilitate this process of personality’s sedimentation by enabling stillness of the shishya through meditation.

Modern behavioral sciences have a lot of catching up to do as based on my first hand experience I can confidently state that for sustainable, effortless personal transformation nothing beats the path of Kriya yoga with guidance from a brahma nishta Guru. The Guru’s shakti works mysteriously and when supported with regular devotion and kriya practice of the shishya, it can work miracles in terms of personal transformation .

For me, bringing some discipline to my dietary habits has been a challenge. I have always had a weakness for good food and that had been by undoing in my early years as I had put on a lot of weight. It took serious determination and psychological hacks to break that conditioning for my physical transformation. While a high protein, low carb diet with intermittent fasting may work for shredding fat from the body, it is far from ideal if one wants to journey deep within. I have tried different things with my diet and found out various empirical truths which work for me. I will try and share my experiences in this article. As with most things in life, it is best to experiment and see what works for oneself before proclaiming something as a universal prescription.

The biggest challenge for me early on was sitting still. For any meditative process, sitting still is the first step. However my habits of drinking a lot of black coffee , intense strength workouts and high protein low carb food made me very jittery. When I used to sit, my feet used to to shake and hands used to move. I now sometimes wonder at the excess energy drain these physical tics entailed. While I could deadlift 2 times my bodyweight and do weighted pullups with 30 kgs, I could not sit still for 5 minutes in a cross legged posture. It was a humbling experience initially.

As my sadhana became deeper, my dietary preferences switched to fruits, raw food and khichari (rice lentil preparation). Over time for physical fitness I just did basic hatha yogic asanas and dropped all strength training. The thought that one has to repress oneself and be perfect in all aspects before starting yoga is not really correct, the unnecessary stuff justs drops off over time. It is meditation and Guru’s grace that moves one towards yama and niyama almost without effort. Enforcing a set of yamas and niyamas on oneself without a Guru’s guidance will just lead to frustration. We all have it backwards.

I have also found fasting to be of immense help in clearing out the body and mind. Especially during certain times of the year like Navaratri or Mahashivaratri there is extra support from nature for fasting. As I move ahead in spiritual journey, I have become more and more sensitive to what I eat. The scriptures are correct on sattvic, rajasic and tamasic qualities in food. These do get imposed onto the person eating the food. In my experience if I eat pre- packaged food , my awareness drops almost instantly and I feel lethargic. Freshly cooked food or fruits work well for me. On the days when my stomach is light and I have eaten fresh food the previous day, it has been effortless for me to sit still. The best meditation sessions have always had this ingredient. So while food may not in itself be enough to support the spiritual practice, it is an integral aspect of the same.

Quite possibly the biggest challenge that I have faced in my sadhana is that of variability in terms of intensity of meditation. Although it is stated that one should not seek meditative experiences, in the beginning stages such experiences can enhance a seeker’s motivation and create a virtuous cycle leading to deepening of the practice. While I have made a point of sitting down every day to do my practices, in my experience the session can sometimes be a miss. I have tried to analyse the several factors which play a role in the same. I will detail them out in subsequent posts. However, in brief I feel the following things play a role in no particular order –

• Food consumed in the previous day or two – Heavy/rich food means dullness, lighter fibre rich food and skipped dinners have marked my best sessions.
• Physical tiredness if any due to insufficient rest or travel – This generally links to the next point and I have found that there is a golden mean of rest where I have to be , anything more or less can lead to sluggishness
• Disturbed sleep in the previous night
• Arguments, disagreements with others – This has caused emotional turmoil at that point and sometimes get carried over into meditation
• Overthinking on pending or previous tasks related to office or home – This creates an unnecessary feedback loop where mind continues to wander
• Illness of the body – This is self-explanatory
• Disturbances during meditation – It can be a sudden noise from outside which causes disruption
• Place of meditation – A separate room in one’s house with burning incense and good ventilation makes a world of difference. Hotel rooms are the worst.
• Phases of the moon – My deepest meditative states happened on Poornima or full moon day

With the learnings of the past sessions I have evolved my algorithm for things I need to ensure for a good meditative session. Even when I try to plan everything perfectly and balance out all these variables, there can still be an x factor which can throw things off balance. It can be very challenging sometimes to accept that despite all the preparation, the meditation session was not as deep as expected. This is where at least for me surrendering to my Guru has helped. Instead of getting overly bothered by it, I have started doing the practices as a form of offering to my Guru. It is still easier said than done !!

As Guruji says, when you are flying high above the ground, a small pebble can make you crash to the ground. So it is important to really pay attention to the small things in order to bring consistency and build momentum. However when all is said and done, Gurukripa Hi Kevalam.

I have always been someone who jumps the gun and reacts to unfamiliar situations. That has led me to react to unexpected situations in manners which were not really thought through. Especially in situations where I was being criticized for something in the workplace or I was under some time pressure I usually had a reaction which I later on regretted. I always felt that it was possibly due to my insecurities about myself which made me react in a certain way. As they say when you have red colour glasses, the whole world appears red. So while my superiors felt that while I had strong reasoning ability and insights into situations, whenever I was pushed into an unfamiliar situation or in moments of pressure I reacted in ways which were not very optimal. Hence this was an important area of improvement for me.

There were several trainings that I had attended which emphasized the importance of thinking clearly in situations and many of them offered several tools to do so. However, they had a severe limitation in that they addressed the cognitive aspect of my personality and did not take a holistic approach. Telling an angry person that anger is bad and saying that counting backwards from 1000 can help addresses the issue only at the surface level. It does not address the core aspect of why that anger gets triggered in the first place. I felt that most if not all of these methods were very sub par ways of dealing with a personality change. I had even tried committing myself to these changes and felt that things were improving but then again a situation would occur and I would be back to square one.

Deep down I always realized that I was getting triggered because I was insecure in that situation. It could be because the person in front would be judging my work and by my twisted logic my consequent worth in the scheme of things. In fact many an organizations encourage this insecurity as it leads to the employees tending to put much more effort to prove a point to themselves. However, I personally feel that over time this type of culture can become toxic. In a way my achievement orientation throughout life had been guided by this sense of insecurity.

Until I got seriously into Yoga, I never realized that my response to situations was in my control. The grace of my Guru and a daily habit of sitting in meditation started slowly unraveling the layers of psychological knots at the energy level. The conditioning that I had from childhood had resulted in certain patterns of thoughts and behavior. With meditation things slowed down to a point where I became aware of the situation and its impact on me. This helped me calibrate my response to the same.The change started off gradually as I tended to worry less and less about negative feedback and started increasing my focus on whether I was doing the right thing. As a result of this shift in my internal mindset my knee jerk reactions to unfamiliar situations reduced as I realized it was not important for me to prove a point to anyone. I started deep diving into situations and taking my time to come up with solutions.

I also used to have anxiety about things in the workplace and used to brood for days on end on someone’s offhand comment which I interpreted as a personal failing. Not a very healthy way to live at all !! However now I don’t really brood over things that much unless the matter can be solved by thinking. This has been nothing short of a miracle for me personally. Despite more and more organizations looking to eastern wisdom for answers I feel that the ancient tools of yoga are still very underestimated and unexplored. Yoga passes off as a stress management system at best in most organizations but it can effectively do a silent and radical transformation from within.

An interesting way the human mind works is illustrated by Pascal’s Wager. Blaise Pascal, an eighteenth century mathematician and philosopher presented this argument.
He argued that a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God. If God does not actually exist, such a person will have only a finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.), whereas he stands to receive infinite gains and avoid infinite losses. This exemplifies the trait of loss aversion amongst human beings which along with groupthink have ensured the proliferation of organized religion.

Hence, it is no wonder that a few in a million can break past this conditioning and reach the truth. Knowledge from scriptures and books can at best create an idle curiosity but it will not ignite the fire of self-transformation. The human ego is so crafty, that once it has read these ideas, it assimilates them and can create an outward appearance of having reached this state of being without there being an actual transformation. The only thing that can set a person on the path of self-transformation and become a true seeker is direct experience.

I had read many scriptures which talked about how one should be moral, ethical and in general be a good human being. From my experience of life, I know that it all sounds good on paper but when the rubber meets to road, it is convenience and not idealism which dictates the way we live. Every one of us is a living, breathing human being and we are all seeking to be more than we are. If this longing to be more express itself in the form of seeking power and wealth, it will eventually override any knowledge from books and religious or cultural conditioning. Then religion will get interpreted to suit and fit the ambition for power and wealth. In a way that is how spiritual traditions that start off meaning well for humanity, end up becoming dogmatic belief systems.

The only way genuine transformation can take place if its comes from within from a basis of personal experience. I personally did not see the importance of essential things like ahara, vani and vichar shuddhi (purity of diet, thoughts and speech). Our scriptures have insisted that these things are very important to lead a good life. Religious leaders talk about it all the time although many of them may themselves be unable to adhere to them. However, once I had a few inner experiences with the grace of my Guruji, inner purity became a sine qua non for me. It was not even as if I had to try hard to maintain it. It was as if everything inside me was starting to get aligned to the extent that it happened by itself. So I feel that kriya yoga is the ultimate in personal transformation as it is both potent and organic because unlike other standard methods of inducing personal transformation it does not rely on the mind. Guruji talks about how his methods have helped people quit habit forming substances like tobacco and alcohol, problems which modern behavioral scientists are still trying to solve. The mind can create its own web of illusion where one can be trapped for ages and feel that they have made progress. The grace of a brahma nishta Guru makes self-transformation almost effortless.

In the bodybuilding circles there is an understanding that anyone starting off will overestimate their physical transformation that can happen with one year of work and will underestimate what can happen with ten years of work. A bias like that in something like bodybuilding where clear visible results can be seen speaks volumes about the way the human brain is wired. One can imagine the difficulty in managing expectations in spirituality where everything outward remains the same and there is transformation within. Humans have traditionally evolved from hunter-gatherers and that part of the brain continues to do cost-benefit calculations for each of the things we do. We are mostly focused on outcome and not on the process. In my experience it is best to start any spiritual practice with an open mind without expectations. It is also incidentally the most difficult.

With spiritual practices there is also the problem of unrealistic notions that just lead to further confusion. Everyone comes with their biases and conditioning which results in either dismissing the whole thing as a hoax or wanting to have superpowers on the first day. So actually coming to whole thing with a sense of devotion and process orientation may be the first and possibly the biggest hurdle. I remember being totally lost and confused with thousand different views and opinions. When one does not know the terrain, how can one know which is the right direction. That is why a Guru is needed. Otherwise it could have been done by reading books and trying on one’s own.

I am possibly the last person who would go to someone for help. I have graduated with top honours from one of the top business schools in the country. I had also put in a lot of effort and transformed to a enviable physique to the astonishment of the people who knew me. However during all these endeavours, whether it was my foolhardiness or arrogance, I did not feel the need to have a personal guide. I just have always had a strong will to the point of it becoming an obstacle for me on occasion.

However in the inner realm, things work differently. There is too much information out there. There is also deliberate obfuscation created by prakriti to ensure only the ones who are ready for this knowledge have access to it. I remember my family being pious and devout and never understood the importance of the same. Now I realize that devotion and intense longing can be the single most important drivers which can guide one through the obstacles on this path. As my Guruji says, shraddha and bhava are extremely essential to go on this journey.