Dangers of Teaching Meditation

Meditationtime Forum Post

Date:  Posted 5 years before May 08, 2017

MiBeloved 5 years ago

It is said that fools rush in where wise men fear to tread. Taking that statement apart bit by bit, it means that one ventures into a domain in which one will be hurt considerably but one does not know that because the domain seems to be attractive initially. It seems that one will gain by going there.

The whole thing is based on the evolutionary drive we get from nature for exploitative opportunities. Everyone is looking for the next advantage but somehow we convince ourselves that we are magnanimous great people who are selfless. But our actions tell a different story. Teaching Yoga and Meditation is actually a very dangerous adventure but many are attracted to it and want to make a livelihood using yoga and meditation.

I have never seen a single instruction in any of the standard books coming out of India which gives anyone the right to use yoga commercially. Check the Shiva Samhita, the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, Yoga Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita, and if you find any instruction about commercializing yoga and adapting it for other uses besides the one intended by the writers of these books, please send me a notation about it.

Even though I have done these practices for over 40 years in this body, still I am affected by the association of the persons whom I teach from time to time. This is an inbred fault involved in teaching. All teachers are affected by the energy of their students. Most of this energy is negative because the students are usually reluctant to take up all the disciplines required. Especially in American where people want to adopt yoga for their own uses and do not want to actually follow the original disciplines, where they want to redefine yoga and adapt it to New Age ideas it is hazardous to teach yoga or meditation.

One ends up struggling with students who argue and who want to redefine yoga in their own way.

It goes back to motive. I challenge anyone to show me how Patanjali said that yoga is for removing stress and the psychological situations which modern people encounter in the developed countries. But if you are going to shows it please let us sit down with a Sanskrit dictionary and look at the Sanskrit. Do not use a translation which was written by someone who hijacked Patanjali and who issues English words for Sanskrit word which we won’t find in a standard Sanskrit to English dictionary.

Motive is important. For instance people are using Buddhism today in the West for all sorts of reasons, in fact Buddhism was altered considerably since it was invented by and introduce by Gautama Buddha. What was his motive? So if we take his system and use it but we do not have his motive to begin with, what is happening then to the process which he introduces? Is it still the same process after we twist and turn it this way and that way.

What would it take to just realize that I am making up something that is different and then honestly saying to you, “Look this is not what Buddha did. This was not his motive. This is not his system. I am taking a part from his system and then a part from Jack and then a part from Henry and my new recipe is this or that.”

Teaching is hazardous for many reasons. One reason is that if you use someone’s method and then the person comes back to you and objects to the use of his or her name, then what will happen?

Are we free to use anyone’s name for our process when that process is not what was intended by that person?

Are all the old teachers dead and gone forever, so that we are not accountable to any of them for using their name in a distortion of their teachings?

Teaching is dangerous because one has to take up the feedback from the students and the negativity which comes from their karma, their resultant consequential energies which are coming due to their present and previous social interactions.

If a student has negative energies coming to him or her by virtue of their actions before meeting the teacher, some of those energies will reach the teacher and affect the teacher accordingly. And there is no way around it except to limit the association of such students and except by demanding that they take up the disciplines required.

But if you are commercializing yoga and meditation, then it is a totally different ball game. Then a whole set of karmic consequences come into play. And since yoga was never a commercial venture previously in India, the rules of playing the commercial game are yet to be revealed to players.

Personally I am against the commercialization of yoga for any reason whatsoever. The original system and it is plastered all over the Sanskrit books is what is called dakshina, which is a Sanskrit word meaning a donation –fee offered to a teacher as remuneration for instructions. This was based on a teacher-student relationship like that of a father-son. It was not an institutionalized fee like paying for a course at a university.

I taught yoga and meditation since around 1973 and I have never charged a fee to anyone. I have never taught anyone on the basis of money. The yoga and meditation which I teach, disappears in my mind if there is any mention of money as a principle of exchange for the teaching. The energy itself of yoga and meditation, the energy which I have, immediately leaves my psyche as soon as there is any idea of commercialization.

Yoga and Meditation techniques live with me like living with a conditional wife. Such a wife threatens to leave the husband if he violates certain agreements. Since the husband is dependent on this wife, he has to toe the line or lose the services and agreeable company of the woman.

Since I am dependent on yoga and meditation in that conjugal way, I am stuck and do not dare do anything to cause true yoga and genuine deep meditation to go away from me.

There is a literal side to this. In the Nath Sampradaya of Mahayogin Gorakshnath, one of our father-yoga gurus, whom we are eternally indebted to for giving us the kundalini conquest techniques, there is a legend as follows. And to be clear about this, this is not a myth or something made up. You can tell people I said that.

In the beginning when Lord Shiva was the only person doing yoga and the only one of the celestial people who understood what it was and what it would do. He was practicing yoga by himself but his wife was present, the celestial goddess who was later called Durga or Parvati.

So she began to do some yoga but she was not serious about it. Still she was the first student of it. Gorakshnath Guruji was the disciple of Matsyendranath who learned yoga directly from Lord Shiva when Parvati was being taught. At the time Matyendranath was not even in a human body. He was evolving up from a fish form but since Lord Shiva and Parvati was by a lake, Matsyendranath overhead what Shiva was telling Parvati about yoga.

Later this same instruction was used by Matsyendranath in a human body to master the yoga kriyas. Now this is not a myth. The fact is that without getting help from the goddess one cannot master this yoga. Yoga-meditation is like marrying a very sophisticated spoilt young woman who is used to having all her needs met. So if one marries such a woman one will have to do whatever is required to keep her happy, otherwise she will get pissed off and go away.

Therefore one cannot commercial the real yoga and meditation, or it will leave immediately. Swami Muktananda did to some extent commercial yoga because he had some very wealthy students who encouraged that. Mahesh Yogi also fell into that system of commercialization with his TM trademark and so on. So these are serious mistakes. As soon as a guru does this, yoga and meditation goes far away and another woman comes which looks like the process and serves a new type of yoga which leads nowhere in the spiritual direction.

In addition, fortunately for me I have never paid a penny for yoga instructions. I have never attended any class where I had to pay a fee. Mostly I learned yoga in the astral world from masters using subtle bodies there. I did learn from Yogi Bhajan when he was physically present but he never discussed any money. I learnt from Authur Beverford but I was like a son-student to him only. There was never any mention of fees or money.

I have taken instructions from a few advanced teachers who have commercialized yoga but I never paid any of these teachers because I took instructions from those persons in the astral world. On the physical side I could not even approach these teachers because they had an organization or institution around them which make it difficult to get close to them unless one paid large sums of money.

There was a time when Swami Muktananda used to be in such a position. The same thing happened with Yogananda and some others. In the Hare Krishna Movement some of this occurred as well where sometimes to get initiations one has to come up with a large sum of money. Somehow by the grace of providence, I did not have to fit those tabs. Hare Krishnas do not teach Ashtanga Classic Yoga and they do not teach meditation as it is defined by Patanjali or by Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. They say that such yoga and meditation is not relevant in this particular era.

Some student may offer me a donation or assistance in expenses publishing books and doing other things for the sake of getting yoga and meditation information to others. For such donation, I accept the offers because these motives do not offend the meditation and yoga practice which I do.

Call it what you like but the meditation and yoga which I do would vanish if a person tries to use us commercially. That person might go on teaching and might even use terms from my literature and say that I was teaching that but still the real substance of what I taught will have left that person.

Students should be careful to manage their karmas so that the energy does not feed back to the teacher. After all if you are a good patient you won’t want your doctor to contact your disease. Why spread your disease to the teacher? Better to take the disciplines required and keep yourself confined until you are healed of the disease.

Dear Beloved 5 years ago

NY Times just posted an article on how yoga can wreck your body.  This lines up with your point on the commercialization of yoga.  Teachers with the wrong intent of making a profit are perhaps causing lots of injuries to students that are inexperienced and in some cases too overweight or have tight muscles that do not allow for many yoga postures. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/magazine/how-yoga-can-wreck-your-body.html

Marcia Beloved 5 years ago

Here is a rebuttal to the article that Dear posted.  In India, yoga is practiced with a different attitude, and also in different clothes.  It is practiced by householders and also in a stricter way if one lives in an ashram.

I'm sure the contrast could have been stressed more, but this is a polite way of differentiating India's yoga from the yoga that was transplanted in the United States:

http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/the-great-yoga-divide/