Impracticality of Yoga Practice
Meditationtime Forum Post
Date: Posted 4 years before Jun 05, 2018
MiBeloved 4 years ago
There are many practice impediments which students face from day to day. These should be negotiated in the interest of yoga and not in the interest of maintaining or improving the social status quo. An expert yogi knows how to do this because he or she has the instinct to put yoga progress as number one priority.
However, even those who are not expert should try their best not to forget yoga and to keep striving to attain it on a consistent basis, no matter what. You do not have to be an expert to practice yoga and get some benefit out of it, but you must practice if you want to advance.
Some students turn sour on yoga if they find they have done it or they have served a yoga guru or they have read yoga books, and then they see others who are far gone in the practice, way beyond their achievements. This is small-mindedness but it does affect some students. It makes them develop a hostile attitude towards yogis and yoga.
The first handicap is not being able to live in an ashram or not being able to be under a regiment of strict yoga. This is a handicap but all the same those who are in an ashram environment may resent being there since under those circumstances so many features of human existence are restricted. In the ashram one cannot do this and one cannot do that. These restrictions can get the better part of a student and turn him or her into an antagonist against yoga. It does happen.
All the same if one is not in the ashram, maintaining a regiment of daily practice can be a bitch? There are so many influences which effectively can wipe out yoga interest. There is the daily association at the place of employment. There is the family, the relatives. There are the friends who are after pleasure in its numerous forms. There is the addiction to various sounds, even to meditational music. There is the addiction to sweet foods and fatty eatables. There is the addiction to intoxication by means like smoking marijuana and taking cocaine. There is the available of sexual intercourse which is a sure way to kill yoga. Who wants to wake up early after a good night’s fuck?
Who wants to restrain from sex just to use hormone energy to raise kundalini up the spine into the brain? Is sexual climax not more exciting and enlivening?
What about the time and the place?
If the time and place do not coordinate to facilitate practice, then you are in the pits. You will not be able to practice. You will get supportive excuses from circumstances where you will feel that the lack of practice is justified.
When the yoga-guru questions you, you will have stated reasons to support your lack of practice and you will exclaim:
“How do you expect me to practice under the circumstances? If providence does not facilitate me what can I do? Do you expect me to resist sex from this beautiful or handsome person? Do you think that I can give up my job and still make an income? Do you feel that I can go against the status requirements? Please Guruji, show us a practical process.”
Alfredo 4 years ago
Very good Acharya, who better than you to call the attention about this important topic.
On the issue of envy, even though you did not call it as such, but small-mindedness, it is the same, only when it propels you into further practice and austerities, it becomes positive, otherwise it is mostly a negative feeling, as you pointed out.
Swami Sarveshwarananda, French Swami that used to live in Hariharananda's ashram while the Guruji was alive, told me that it was like living in a pressure cooker. For example, a friend of mine entered the ashram as a Brahmachari, proud as a cock, and soon enough Hariharananda placed him in a Mouna (silent) diet for a whole month. It does not seem much, but it was for him, a Western guy, and he developed a resentment towards the Guru and left after 15 days, dejected and defeated, ended up in another Miami Guru's place where he would gorge on food almost daily. Another lady, a highly educated woman from Seattle, was one of the first to enter Hariharananda's ashram, but she was controversial and quarreled with others, and sure enough the Guruji put her in Mouna also, and she lasted 2 years! Can you believe that? She would not talk for 2 years, and Hariharananda would not relent, and she finally left. Was Hariharananda tough? You betcha, he himself was in Mouna for almost 10 years, practicing austerities in a room in Puri, Orissa, where Ananda Mayi Ma visited him more than once.
The regimen of daily yoga can be a bitch, that's why you have so many westerners that get into the Ayahuasca and other mind-altering drugs to obtain spiritual experiences expediently with this short-cut. I am in contact with a famous one of them right now who recently wrote an on-line e-book on Ayahuasca trips and their results with a bombastic name and who asked me to review the book for him. Who wants to wake up early, control eating, perform Tapasya, meditate for hours, shunt social engagements and even sex with the wife, when you can drink a concoction of Ayahuasca and obtain the same results? But, can you? That is the real question. Why people like Shivananda, Krishnananda, Srila Yogeshwaranada, yourself, similar others, do not go that route? Hey, Ganja is readily available in Rishikesh, it is all over and the Sadhus are always smoking it in the Ghats of the Ganges there.
Without Mumukshut, Yogic Fire in the Belly, nothing much is going to happen.
chris_hall1951 4 years ago
Thanks’ always to you Alfredo Prabhuji for sharing your experiences, they are full of immense insight and a genuine appreciation for what Yogi Madhvacarya has given to us.
Alfredo Prabhuji, ananta ki jai, jai, jai!
=====================
Envy can be utilized for one progress or one's digression, hopefully for one's progress, if not, such an individual is perpetually doomed in this world and the astral one's as well.
Woe to them forevermore!
