Understanding yoga

Understanding yoga

October 2015

By TA Balasubramiam

Book Review of Understanding Mind is your Business & Body – The Greatest Gadget by Jaggi Vasudev, Jaico Publishing, Paperback, INR 199; 170 pages

What is your mind? And what is your body? And how does yoga enable us to enrich our lives through our minds and bodies? These are the fundamental questions that this collection of discourses seeks to answer.

These are the two basic postulates of the series of talks, which are combined in this two-in-one book. Jaggi Vasudev (called Sadhguru by his followers) presents us with a lucid understanding of what we call our minds and bodies. He explains subtle details with clearly elucidated reasoning, coupled with wry humour, witty anecdotes drawn from Indian folklore and mythologies, and from his own experiences as a yogi, visionary and mystic. In the process of answering questions by seekers who attend his talks, he clears up many gray areas. He underlines the role of yoga as one of the most powerful ways for a human being to realise the possibilities of transcending both mind and body, and to experience a higher state of consciousness.

In The Circus of the Mind, Vasudev points out that “your mind – which should have been a ladder to the Divine – has unfortunately become a stairway to hell, because it is too identified with so many things.” In essence, our mind becomes blunt and useless because we mess it up with identifications, including attachments to worldly possessions and relationships. “Only when you get disidentified – when you are able to be involved, but not entangled – only then can it stop.” He points out that being disidentified is not detachment, which arises from
fear of entanglement – which leads to a virtually lifeless existence.
“Only if life is exuberant within you can it carry you to higher possibilities.”

Likewise, in our experience of the body, Vasudev observes: “You can expand your sensory body to include the whole universe. That is what we call yoga. Yoga means union.” A yogi, therefore, is anyone who works on transforming the physical body into a ladder to heaven. The energies in our bodies are concentrated along seven chakras. Vasudev says, with reference to the chakras, “The essence of yoga is to activate your energy system in such a way that your sense of body is constantly lowered. You are in the body, but you are no longer the body.”

For anyone seeking clarity about the process of yoga, and how one may harness the human mind and body for spiritual growth, this is an excellent guide. If you are familiar with Jaggi Vasudev’s discourses and practice yoga, these two books will add to your knowledge and perhaps help in your growth to the next level.