by Satguru Swami Nirmalananda

You were trained by masters.  Your family and schoolteachers were masters of “busy mind.” They did their best to cultivate your mastery.  Yogic training gives you “quiet mind,” a sweet inner stillness, spaciousness and peace.  It deepens into bliss.

This process involves both training and conditioning.  Training is when you study the theory and begin to apply it.  A baseball pitcher gets coaching on his throw or a golfer on his swing.  Their His coaches take videos and measure the speed of his ball.  Then they show him how he’s losing power with some little thing, like the placement of his foot.  He tries it out.  The coaches help him fine-tune his new plan.

Now the conditioning begins.  He practices.  He throws the ball, then he throws it again.  Hundreds or thousands of pitches later, he’s ready to bring it to the game, with the crowds roaring and his teammates watching his feet placement.  He has to forget it all, even the theory and plan, so he can simply do it.  He gets in the groove and throws the ball.

You need both training and conditioning.  Theory alone is not enough; you need to practice.  This means that you quiet your mind.  But quiet mind doesn’t last very long in the beginning.  Your mind gets busy again, so you have to quiet it again.  And again… Repetition is the key.

Yoga excels at quieting your mind.  All yogic practices are about quieting your mind, including the poses.  With athletic and aerobic yoga styles, quiet mind is often attained through exhaustion.  You’re too fatigued to think, which is mildly blissful.  Similarly, most meditation systems work this way.  You sit through the internal storms, waiting for them to pass so you get a moment of inner stillness.  Then you do it again.

Svaroopa^® Yoga is different.  It works energetically.  Your spine is the central conduit of energy in your body, so our poses decompress it, opening up new levels of energy inside.  In Svaroopa^® Vidya meditation, you pour your mental energy toward infinite Consciousness.  These energetic interventions work more powerfully than…