“Yoga has been my path home. I don’t mean the traditions and culture of India. Those have held some interest for me but they have never been at the heart of what I was looking for. What yoga is really about is who and what we are and the experience of Divine realities. These are my home and yoga practice has been my way to that home.”

Lawrence Noyes

Yoga is by now well-known in the West, especially the popular physical exercises and short meditations that promote health and well-being. These aspects of yoga directly address some of the biggest personal challenges of our times such as chronic stress, low energy, an overly busy mind, depression, and spiritual loneliness. If you want to feel better in life and have more energy, creativity, and psychological balance, a moderate yoga practice under experienced guidance will almost certainly provide that for you. Along the way yoga will bring you inner healing, a coming home to your body, and levels of subtle ecstasy pleasing to your heart and soul.

Yoga meditation, when taken up intensively, is also a way to cultivate levels of consciousness and liberation far beyond the ordinary. The deepest yoga teachings come from those who took a renunciate path and inquired by their own direct experiences into the nature of reality.

Yoga has its source in what might be called Truth itself, or God, or Divine Love. In a very real sense, yoga is not something from India. It is from the core of reality. The many lineages and traditions of yoga that exist today were formed by those who entered into that core and left us teachings and practices to show the way. Their different styles and practices reflect the individuality of each teacher and to some extent the cultural context in which he or she lived.

To enter into the core of reality by one’s own direct experience is challenging but also fully possible. Although willful practices such as postures and breathing are important to begin with it is only through increasing degrees of surrender that progress continues past a certain point. All willful practices have an inherent limit. The willfulness itself always imposes, however subtly, one’s own hand in the matter. In the beginning this is necessary but eventually progress is only made through abandoning the willful approach and taking refuge in surrender to the Divine.

This process calls for a gradual letting go of external concerns and an absorption into God or Truth. Although many teachings about this Way have been left to us it is for each seeker to discover what this means for him or herself.

Yoga at the deepest levels is known by many names: Surrender Meditation, Kundalini Yoga, Sahaja Yoga, Spontaneous Yoga, Natural Yoga, Royal Yoga, and many other names. The name is not that important. The essence of the practice is surrender to the ultimate Higher Power.

“This meditation revealed and still reveals more to me about myself and the nature of reality than any other method I have used. I teach Surrender Meditation to those students who have taken Enlightenment Intensives, studied yoga with me and who are inclined to meditate. In a moderate form of practice, Surrender Meditation is useful for healing, insight, creativity and balanced living. In a more committed form of practice the heart of yoga opens up, calling for increasing degrees of commitment and detachment from other concerns. On any spiritual retreat that I give, yoga practice is always a part of it, according to what is appropriate for the group.”

Surrender Meditation begins with a prayer to God or whatever is Divine to you. There can be many styles of this prayer but the essence is that you pray that your meditation be blessed. Pray to give over your body, mind, emotions and life to God. It is not necessary that you have a clear notion of God in order to do this. Often we do not have that. Simply intend with purity as you pray. This can include actions such as bowing down, lighting a candle or other actions that you know from experience tend to move you into divine contact.

Let your breath flow smoothly and deeply until there awakens an inner urge to surrender and move. Then, as Swami Kripalu put it, ‘Lift the dominion of the mind from the body.’ That is, let whatever wants to happen, happen. Go with it. Actions, movements, thoughts, sounds and feelings will all occur of their own accord. These are spontaneous yogic rites. Let these occur.

End with a prayer of thanks, gratefully accepting whatever experiences occurred.

“Yoga is sometimes thought of in the West as a system of exercises but that is missing the real point. Yoga is a love affair. You are alone in a room but it is a love affair with the Divine. If you understand this, if you open your heart as you do whatever yoga practice you are doing, you will make real progress and learn about the true nature of yoga.”

To be continued...

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