14-Mile Bike Ride

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By Swami Samvidaananda

My client came in limping, actually limping.

She had come for an Embodyment® Yoga Therapy session. A friend, seeing her in pain, had recommended it to her. So she signed up for a series of sessions even though she had never done Svaroopa® yoga before. She was willing to try anything. She was normally a very physically active person. The pain was really limiting her.

At the end of the hour, her pain was gone. She felt great! She was not limping as she left. She practically skipped out. However, when she arrived for her Overlap Healing session the next day she was limping again.

What happened? She felt so good, she went for a 14-mile bike ride!

I get it. The pain she had been struggling with was gone. With the pain gone, she had the energy and ability to do something she has really missed being able to do. So she went for it. And it felt great. Until, those 14 miles on a bike re-installed all those muscular tensions we had released in the Embodyment® therapy session. Then, of course, the pain returned.

What she didn’t understand after her first session is that the deep muscular tensions creating her pain had been accumulating for a long time. She loved long bike rides as well as workouts and hikes. These had laid in patterns of muscular tension in the deep muscles connected to her spine.

Those tensions built and built, until one day there was a tipping point. Her tight spinal muscles compressed a disc in her spine enough to put pressure on her nerves. Then, unfortunately, “Hello, pain.”

The good news is that Svaroopa® yoga therapy releases the tensions in those deep spinal muscles. You are freed from your pain! We excel at releasing the tensions in order to decompress your spine. We call this core-opening.

But it is a gradual process. Tight muscles have a tendency to spring back into their pattern of tension. Thus, they need time to get used to a new pattern of a long, relaxed openness. A series of yoga therapy sessions is best, to get you going.

We also encourage you to do yoga poses and yogic breathing at home. That way, every day you reinforce the new patterns and speed your progress to a whole new you. Plus you save money by needing fewer sessions.

Not only will you have less pain, you will have greater flexibility. You will literally be standing taller. And you will feel renewed, relaxed and revived, from the inside out.

Yoga therapy clients and students feel lighter, calmer, more optimistic, more cheerful and energized. That’s because, as you release deep tensions at the core of your body, you deepen into the core of your Being, which Svaroopa® yoga calls your own Self.

And it all begins with a yoga therapy session. Are you ready to give it a try?

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Why a Guru?

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Why a Guru? To set you free. The Guru doesn’t make you Divine. The Guru shows you that you are already Divine. The Guru doesn’t make you great, but shows you that you are already blazing with Divine Light. Baba said it this way, “Just as the wind disperses the clouds, but does not create another blazing sun, so the Grace of a Siddha simply removes the veil of ignorance so that you realize you are already perfect.” If this is what you want, you need a Guru.

 — Gurudevi Nirmalananda

From Gurudevi’s full discourse “Guru? Ashram? What? Why?“

Watch Full Discourse Here

Embodied Consciousness

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I call it embodied Consciousness, that you know your own Divine Essence while you participate in the world. This approach to spiritual development is not a process of transcendence. You don’t rise above the world. You live in it, but in a new way. You don’t…

— Gurudevi Nirmalananda

From Gurudevi’s full discourse “Your Cosmic Birthright“

Watch Full Discourse Here

My Heart Opening

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By Anna Ranish

I’m starting to feel grateful that I live with chronic muscle pain.

Saying this has taken years. It’s not because I’m a masochist! I feel grateful because the pain has caused me to search really deep inside. Thus, I have done many practices that helped to transform me into a more compassionate person.

One of those practices is Supported Fish (Salambha Matsyasana). I have probably done it in yoga classes only twice. However, I often don’t learn things when I do them in class. I need a lot of repetition.

I got plenty of repetition when I went through excruciating back pain in 2023. Physical therapy couldn’t help me. That’s when I signed up for a long series of Overlap Healing yoga therapy. I had 35 sessions over 3 months.

My therapist had me do Supported Fish often during that time. I really came to love and enjoy the feeling of my body spread across two Svaroopa® blanket rolls.

I continued doing the pose at home daily. After a while, I felt a powerful shift in my heart. It felt as if someone reached in, took my old heart out and put a new one in. This was a much gentler and more compassionate heart!

I no longer do Supported Fish pose daily. However, I monitor myself to recognize when my heart is feeling a bit rough, not as compassionate as I would like. Then I self-prescribe myself for a week or more of Supported Fish poses. What bliss!

Yoga Therapy

Deepening Inward

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By Gurudevi Nirmalananda

“I lost my Shavasana,” a yogini complained to me. I was opening a weekend workshop, but she came to talk before I got started. “My teacher told me to explain that’s why I’ve come — so you can give me my Shavasana back.”

I responded, “You’re probably still going deep, but not unconscious. You’re being conscious in Consciousness.” I promised to check on her in our first yoga class, which I was starting in minutes. After an hour of spinal release poses, I led the Guided Awareness in Shavasana, also called Yoga Nidra. She was settled deeply within.

She came to me after class, “You’re right. I was deep, and I knew I was deep while I was deep.” This inner experience has a name in Sanskrit — samadhi. It is a deep immersion into the Consciousness that you are. In the beginning, you may go unconscious at this depth, but you expand into it as you return to it again and again.

Samadhi is the end-goal of the practices listed in the Yoga Sutras.

Yama-niyama-asana-pranayama-pratyahara-dhara.na-dhyana-samadhayo’shtavangani. — Yoga Sutras 2.29

Impulse-control, choice-full action, posture, breathing practices, turning inward, contemplation, meditative flow and meditative absorption are the eight aspects.

This sutra acknowledges that you master things in stages. This is true of worldly skills as well as your inward exploration of your own Beingness. Yama and niyama free you from mental churning. Posture is not only health-giving, it uplifts your attitude. Breathing practices enliven your body while clearing your mind, like a good breeze clears the skies.

Beyond these preparatory practices, the real yoga begins when you turn your attention inward. When you begin with meditation, turning your attention inward is challenging because you haven’t cleared your mind first. It tends to regurgitate your life for you. You’re trying to look inward but all you get is an internalized version of the external world.

Tantra makes it easy. In Svaroopa® Vidya meditation, we repeat mantra aloud, then you get it going internally and… bloop! You’re immersed within. You skipped through Patanjali’s three stages: contemplation (dharana) and meditative flow (dhyana), to land in meditative absorption (samadhi).

You are settled into your own Divine Essence. Ease of being, expansiveness, peace and bliss are qualities you bring with you when your awareness extends outward again. You took the shortcut to Self. It’s called…

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Beyond Death

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By Gurudevi Nirmalananda

You may wonder why Baba gets two birthdays every year as well as two death anniversaries. I honor him according to both the lunar calendar, in accordance with the customs of India, as well as the solar calendar, which is more familiar to me.

The bottom line is that he was too great for one day to commemorate properly. In the many interviews he gave while on tour in America, he said he came to start a meditation revolution. And he did what he said he would do.

Yet he always passed the honors back to his own Guru. The first time I went to Nityananda’s temple in Ganeshpuri, there were two black scorch marks on the cement in front. They came from Muktananda Baba’s offering to Nityananda. Before Baba left on his third world tour, he went and burned a pile of camphor pellets in each spot at 3:00 am every morning for a month. In the privacy of the early morning hours, there was no one to intrude on his personal puja to his Guru.

The scorch marks took a decade to fade. I often sat next to them, in awe of what Baba had been preparing himself to do. While most Shaktipat Gurus give initiation to only a few people, maybe even 100, Baba gave this mystical gift to thousands and thousands. His ability to transmit Divine energy was beyond compare, not to mention how he burned up the worldly density from so many.

The blessings of the Guru are wondrous and extraordinary.

— Swami Muktananda, Secret of the Siddhas page 67

When Baba returned to Ganeshpuri after three years in America, he went to Nityananda’s temple. This time it was the middle of the morning, when the doors were open so he could bow. But a mere bow was not enough.

Baba laid out in a full pranam, belly down on the ground, with his arms outstretched toward Nityananda. Then Baba rolled sideways onto his back, then the other way. He said that he was covering himself with the dust of his Guru’s feet.

A few days later, I went with him along with 150 others. We chanted Shree Guru Gita for Nityananda. I sat where I could see them both, but I really only had eyes for Baba. His presence and his devotion to his Guru filled into cracks and crevices of my heart that I hadn’t known I had.

Sometimes a person comes to me and says, “I met him.” Our eyes meet and we nod. There are no words that do justice to that meeting. Beyond words, beyond understanding, I continue to uncover more and more of what he gave me.

While he is gone, he is still here. A yogi merges into God while still alive, so they don’t leave when they are done with their body. He told us this again and again, to prepare us for his departure. Except he is still here. I revel in his presence with every breath. Jai Muktananda!

Gurudevi’s Bio

Grow into the More

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In the last 20 or 25 years researchers have been doing brain scans of meditators. They’re finding that we use our brains differently than the rest of the world does. Meditation utilizes some parts of your brain that other people are barely using. And meditation quiets down some areas that other people are afflicted by…

— Gurudevi Nirmalananda

From Gurudevi’s full discourse “Made for More“

Watch Full Discourse Here

Ashram Birthday

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By Gurudevi Nirmalananda

Your caring makes the Ashram what it is. There are two kinds of Ashrams. One shelters and nurtures committed seekers within the tradition. The other spreads the teachings far and wide.

It is because of your interest that we do what we do at Svaroopa® Vidya Ashram. Seventeen years old today, with thousands of articles written and free programs offered. Along with retreats to support your inner deepening, we’ve offered hundreds of professional trainings to empower yogis to share the power and beauty of this tradition.

Donors provide our primary financial support, proving they care enough to make sure we will be here next year. Yet they empower me and our swamis to serve everyone who comes. I am grateful for the opportunity to share what I received from my oh-so-generous Guru.

Some Ashrams are a place to retreat from the world. Some are right in the middle of the world. I placed us on Main Street USA for two reasons. One is to make it easy for our residents and guests to access supplies and services. The other is to put yoga and meditation in public view. Yes, I do want to change the world! And I know that yoga and meditation will bring out the best in you.

Our Ashram is fully grown. I say this because I was 17 when I graduated from high school and stepped into the world. In the same way, I see the teachers I have trained serving others, thousands of students. And our swamis offering classes and courses, not only On-Site and Online, but traveling to teach in distant locations almost every month of the year.

Our Ashram is a vibrant center of Consciousness, vibrating with both internal and external energies. Based in the river of Grace, we draw from the timeless teachings of yoga while juggling the myriad opportunities to support others. It’s a little bit like a circus. There’s always something happening!

Yes, Shiva is dancing the world into existence, right here in Downingtown.

Happy birthday to us!

Ashram Birthday Donation

Bittersweet

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By Gurudevi Nirmalananda

Tears well up in my eyes on this bittersweet day, the lunar anniversary of my Baba’s mahasamadhi. He was born on the full moon and he left on the full moon, showing that his mind and heart always shone with Divine Light.

Tears of gratitude mingle with tears of sadness. I would leap at the opportunity to bow at his feet again. Yet I live in a full-time full-pranam, extended out on my belly, on the floor at his feet. Both are true at the same time.

The form and the formless come together in the Guru in a tangible way, so easy to see, so easy to melt into. I could see God in him once I learned how to look. Better yet, he made me able to find God within, to find God being me.

We chant his arati every morning and at satsangs, Jyota se Jyota. And there is a second part to the song. It begins with “Tvameva mata, cha pitta tvameva,” meaning “You are mother, you are father…” Yes, Baba re-mothered me and re-fathered me. He filled in the gaps where my parents couldn’t understand or meet me. I sang heartfully every morning in the years I lived with him.

One of the verses says:

You have given me everything. What shall I offer to you, O Master?

With folded hands, I offer salutations.

For me, more than salutations, I gave him my life. Each morning, singing this verse, I folded my hands and offered him my life. After four or five years of doing this, one morning I was surprised to hear his voice speak to me inside, “What, did you take yourself back since yesterday?” Shocked, I realized it was true. In order to give my life to him again, I must have taken it back.

I laughed out loud as my own inner voice accused me of being an “Indian-giver.” While I knew the phrase was derisive toward native Americans, I was directing it toward myself. After all, I was in India, trying to give something to my Guru that I would simply take back later in the day.

So that time, I gave myself to Baba, knowing I was giving myself to God in a way I had never done before. I have had no reason to take myself back again. It’s a glorious way to live!

Yes, today I celebrate my Baba’s life. I even celebrate his death, for he is even more available now than when he was limited to a form. Jai Muktananda!

Muktananda’s Punyatithi (lunar)