Sports and Spirituality

Sports and Spirituality 

Being a sport means you are willing to play. Willing to play means you are involved or alive to the situation in which you exist, and that is the essence of life. If there is anything that is truly close to a spiritual process, in the normal course of life, that is sports. Swami Vivekananda went to the extent of saying, "In kicking a ball or playing a game, you are much closer to the Divine than you will ever be in prayer." You can pray without involvement, but you cannot play sports without involvement, and involvement is the essence of life. But when people involve themselves in what they do, they often get entangled.

 Anything that you associate with, you tend to get identified with. The moment you get identified with something that is not you, you have invested in a system of hallucination that will look and feel real. Once you have invested in a hallucinatory process, your mind will be one continuous mental disorder, as a hallucinatory process can be kept up only with unceasing activity of the mind, and hence, one ends up turning a miracle into madness.

The mind is a fabulous miracle; you could hold the universe in it, but generally it ends up as a source of all human misery and the basis of madness and suffering. When people get entangled, they feel ugly within themselves and they will make sure everybody else has a taste of this ugliness. So the fundamental of any sport or game takes care of this; that is, if you want to play a game, you must have the fire of wanting to win but also the balance to see that if you lose, it is okay with you. You never play a game to lose, you always play a game to win, but if you lose, it is all right with you.

 If you maintain this fundamental with every aspect of life, you are a sport. And that is all the world expects from you, that you are a sport. Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, whatever kind of situation you are in, you are still a sport. The sacredness of a sporting event is that individuals rise beyond their limitations, achieving a state of abandon that is usually known only at the peak of spirituality. Thus, we have always included sports in our yoga programs. All of our programs have an element of play -- as to play is to live, and to live is to play.

Sourced from: HuffinghtonPost/Sadhguru

Avengers in Texas

Last week I was in Houston volunteering at the biggest Isha Yoga class ever conducted in the USA. It was at the gigantic George R. Brown Convention Center which is just like many other things in Texas, huge! The staff was very nice, and did a great job helping us volunteers get the job done in a timely manner.

In therms of  volunteers, it was truly touching to see the involvement of them all, as I already mentioned it couple days a go on my facebook status update. Just imagine the situation; many of them traveling from different corners of the USA to offer them selves and do whatever was needed. Above all I must mention local Houston volunteers, whom in many ways were the foundation for this Inner Engineering class. For the last 6 months they worked hard, compromising their time between family and work, Without them it would have been nearly impossible to make this mark.

Texas is a wonderful piece of land, mostly flat with oil wells just about everywhere. Because of that, it is one of the wealthiest states. Dallas, Houston, and Austin are, according to the Huffinghton Post, among "Top 10 Big Cities for Jobs". I agree with what a friend of mine told me the other day "they have pretty much everything you can imagine in Texas, the only thing missing is a true inner well-being." She is right! Texas is more than ready for such a step. So right now there are 1,000+ fresh new meditators in the town, let's see what impact they will make on the city! I am sure big things will happen.

Now, you must be wondering about the title "Avengers in Texas". On the last day of our stay in Houston, a bunch of kids arrived at the house we were staying at so we decided to take them for a movie. The youngest one screamed: "Avengeeeeers!!" right away so we were clear on what to go see...

About the movie itself, apparently the Hulk is doing yoga and meditating to keep his anger under control, which is pretty cool! It's said in the movie itself!

Hulk Yoga

The visual effects are top quality plus there is great action - heroes are saving the world from aliens (the whole story is actually kind of unclear, makers were obviously focusing more on the individual scene effects rather than on the big picture). Now that's about it as far as the broad view for you. In the core, the movie is clearly created as a subtle kind of propaganda. Which is upsetting to me. I am sure many will not really understand what I mean by propaganda. It takes little bit of a stepping back to see the bigger picture and understand it. I have much more that I could write here, but I decided not to go any further into this, as this blog is about the benefits of yoga, meditation, love, inclusion, and not reveling about the subtlety of subliminal messaging in the hollywood movie industry.

Pilgrimage to Kailash

FIRST STOP: NEPAL
Nearly six hundred ardent seekers have come from all over the world to be on this pilgrimage to Kailash. For many, their limitations of comfort and convenience will soon be challenged. But for the last 12,000 years, maybe more, pilgrims have been making this journey without a single year’s break. They did not have the boots that we are wearing, the down jackets, tents and food supplies that we have today. They just went with a bag of flour and some fried gram. Many travelled barefoot from South India – people who had never been exposed to cold weather in their life. What would propel these people to make such a journey not knowing whether they would even survive the trip? The magnetic power of Kailash has been drawing people for thousands of years.

Our first stop is Nepal. The very psychology of civilization here is still completely geared towards ultimate liberation. And the very geography has been converted into a living spiritual body. One place that you must visit is Bhaktapur. It is one remnant of how this whole eastern culture used to be at one time. Bhaktapur is a town that was created in a way that it will remind you of the hand of the divine every step. “Bhaktapur” means a city of devotion, or a city of devotees. And every step is actually a temple – what you think is just a place to get water is a temple, a washing place is a temple, even a gossip center is a temple. So when we walked through Bhaktapur, we turned the clock back 1100 years and imagined what it would be like then – when women wore red and men always wore white, and people inhabited these brick buildings that still stand today. Many of the homes are still occupied by the descendants of people who lived in the same homes 1100 years ago.

Bhaktapur is in different states of crumbling, but still, you cannot miss the tremendous sense of aesthetics people had a thousand years ago. How much trouble they took just to make it beautiful. Everything was done by hand. Every brick had to be carried – no lifts, no trucks, nor any kind of machinery. And today, with our modern concrete buildings, senseless display of sign-boards, plastic bottles and plastic covers floating all over the place and noisy smoking automobiles through narrow lanes and alleys of Bhatkapur – it seems that we are going from profoundness to profaneness.

From Nepal, we drove to Zhangmu and then to Saga: on the way, a stretch which took more than 4 hours, we did in around 40 minutes because concrete roads have been laid on some of the most difficult terrains in the last year. It’s been an exciting drive, with terrains that move from green to barren and muddy mountain roads that we climbed down with our Toyota Land Cruiser to reach Saga.

Saga is 5,115 meters above sea-level. And being on the second floor of the hotel, we’re another 3 meters up. Every meter matters here. We made this two-day stop in Saga for people to adjust to the steep climb in altitude. It’s been a true ‘saga’ for some people, but everyone has passed the altitude test. So from here onwards, the test is only of attitude.

I’m writing this on Friday the 13th from Saga, 5 days before this Spot will post because after today, I won’t have access to email. By the time you read this, I will be in Kailash. Tomorrow we leave at 2:30am for Manasarovar, a 20-hour drive.

SOURCED FROM:  http://blog.ishafoundation.org/sadhguru-spot/wed-aug-18-2010/

The Dangers of Improper Yoga

There is a lot of yoga studios around the country these days. Yoga teachers are popping out in hundreds. How do we know which yoga practice is safe for us? And I mean not only for the body!
As we spoke about in the "Yoga: A dimension beyond the physical" last week, yoga goes beyond the physical.
Because of it's potential to greatly enhance your life energy among with happiness and balance, etc.,
naturally it also caries the dangers if practiced improperly, just like any other powerful tool.
So improper yoga can be harmful. In this video, yogi and mystic, Sadhguru speaks about what type of yoga to avoid.

Yoga: A Dimension Beyond the Physical

Beyond the physical

Today, for most people, the word “Yoga” usually conjures up images of twisting the body into impossible postures. The physical aspect of Yoga is only one facet of this multi-dimensional science. Yoga is a technology to bring the body and mind to the peak of their capabilities – allowing one to live life to the fullest.

The very fundamentals of spiritual longing are to transcend the limitations of the physical. For an individual, the most intimate part of physical creation is his or her own body. So the very basis of a spiritual process is to explore the possibilities of the body and to go beyond its limitations.

Your physical body is designed and structured to function by itself without much of your participation. You do not have to make your heart beat or your liver do all of its complex chemistry. You do not even have to breathe; everything that is needed for your physical existence to manifest itself is happening by itself.

The physical body is a self-contained, quite complete instrument. And if you keep it well, you may go through your whole life without ever having a spiritual longing because the body is so complete by itself. If you are fascinated by gadgets, there is no better gadget. Every little thing you explore in the body is quite incredible. But it takes a certain amount of intelligence and awareness for a person to see the limitations of this fantastic gadget. Gadgetry is fine, sophistication of mechanism is fine, but still, the body does not take you anywhere, it just springs out of the earth and flops back into the earth.

Can this be enough? If you look at it from the perspective of the body, it is quite enough. But a dimension beyond the physical somehow got trapped in the physical. This dimension, without which there is no life, has somehow been infused into the physical; life is one thing, but the source of life is another. And the source of life is functioning in every plant, seed and creature. In a human being, the source of life has taken on a higher presence. So for humans, all the simple or even wonderful things that the physical offers at some point become irrelevant.

Because the source of life has taken on a higher presence in a human being, one is in constant struggle between the physical and that which is beyond the physical. Though you are physical, you are also in contradiction with the physical. Though you have the compulsiveness of the physical, you also have the consciousness of not being physical.

Any kind of method or spiritual process you employ to heighten the presence of that which is the source of creation within you is referred to as "yoga." Such methods and processes become necessary because of what seems to be a fundamental conflict between the instinct of self-preservation and the longing to become boundless. These aspects are not against each other, but when you look at it from the perspective of the physical, when your whole perception is limited to the physical, they seem to be in conflict. One force belongs to the physical; the other belongs to the dimension beyond the physical. If one has the necessary awareness to separate the two, there is no conflict. But if one does not have this awareness, if one is identified with the physical, there appears to be a conflict between these two fundamental forces.

If you go by the ways of the body, it knows only self-preservation and procreation. These are the only two aspects of the body. If you go by the dimension beyond the body, the longing is to become boundless. So the instinct of self-preservation and the longing to become boundless come in conflict because of a strong identification with the physical. One force helps you root yourself well on this planet; the other is supposed to take you beyond. Instead of working in collaboration, they become in conflict. All the struggles of humanity in terms of "should I be spiritual or materialistic" are just coming from this.

Unfortunately, when one tries to find physical expression to this longing to become boundless, it usually leads to various types of insatiable activity (e.g., the pursuit of money, power, love, pleasure, property); one always wants to be a little more than who one is right now. So this is a never-ending longing, but this longing is not just seeking a little bit more, it is seeking ultimate expansion. This is the longing of the limited to expand or evolve into the unlimited.

Article by: Sadhguru
at HuffinghtonPost