zentra yoga

Yoga Philosophy

If I ask you to recall a childhood memory you will probably recall a moment either of great joy or great pain. Because during those moments your were exactly there, in the now. You were being in touch with reality as it seems to present itself to you. And If I ask you what where you eating three weeks ago Tuesday evening most probably you wouldn’t remember unless at that moment something special was happening, either a birthday, a holyday or your husband or wife brought you flowers.

People love travelling because most of the time when you are travelling you are experiencing the moment and your mind is completely focussed at what you are doing. It looks, feels, smells and it doesn’t think of work or the bills to pay or the next TV show.

Most of us are dreaming our life, most of us are caught in whirlpool of thoughts. We are always thinking and thinking and talking to our self about what we are thinking. But have you ever realised that your thought were either about the past or the future? And neither of them were real, both of them are creations of the mind. Thoughts are kind of dream, a waking dream.

Life rhythm is becoming excessively fast. We have fast food, fast internet connections, fast highways, and fast trains. Everything is becoming faster. People are now even running in their own houses. The faster we go the more data we have to compile, the more variables we give our minds to play with. We need to realise where we are heading and how we are going there. We need tools to balance the rhythm of our new reality, and this is where yoga comes in.

Swami Satyananda Saraswati, one of the most important figures in yoga alive, once wrote “Yoga is not an ancient myth buried in oblivion. It is the most valuable inheritance of the present. It is the essential need of today and the culture of tomorrow”

Yoga is more than physical exercises. It is a science developed through the ages giving people the possibility to actually understand what and who they are. It is a tool that gives opportunities to experience the moment as it show itself to you, a means to realise the beauty of the infinity of the now. Yoga is your travel guide to the here and now. Have you ever been there? It a wonderful place, it's the only place…

Last week I was sitting in the park and giving myself a time to stop a little after one class and before another one. And I was purposefully going through a few of my child memories trying to understand what made them so strong and intense. Then I ask the moment to give me the same kind of experience right now. So I sat and slowly relax my body, take a few deep breaths, got in touch with myself by feeling my body and slowly expanding my feeling to the outside body starting to look around. There was a pond, ducks sleeping others washing their feathers. There were trees and each of them had their own movement, their leaves colours were changing. So many different layer of greens maybe 20 different colours of green, or brown or bleu or red or orange, so many colours more then I was aware of. There was sound and smell that I had heard and smell before or never smelled. And there I was; in one of those moments where there is nothing else but the magic of the here and now. Like the duck in the pond, I was resting, I was no more looking at the scene but I became part of the scene. I was enjoying completely being in the moment, no thoughts were coming, just complete awareness of being there or here in the moment. That was it, what I had asked for. The intensity of the experience comes with the level of awareness we have from the moment. And this exactly what yoga is trying to teach.

Yoga by its many different techniques and exercises teaches the adept to experience reality in its pure existence. It starts with body consciousness, awareness of tensions, muscles movements etc... Then it moves its awareness to the breath, the prana or the energy making this physical matter alive. Teaching how to alter, change and use this energy (imagine being able to cure yourself, or never get sick). The living mass now becomes aware of its existence and yoga starts to work on the level of the mind. At first this mind is like a monkey moving here and there but slowly yoga tames it and makes firiends with it, to use it to move further into the realm of the soul. You know what you were before your birth -- that is your soul, and from the soul we can reach the realm of the spirit, consciousness, Reality. All those levels interact with each other and each one influences the others, so to experience reality as it is we need to work on each of those layers and this is what yoga is teaching us.

In a way Yoga is guide to the realisation of the Self. But on a more practical level yoga is teaching the way to be happy and content in the now, it teaches us how to get the maximum of the moment, to understand and experience it with and open mind and an open heart.

So if you feel a little bit out of yourself and feel that life is getting a little bit too fast for you to actually experience it the way it you want. Then we encourage you to take the necessary step to slow down and look at what life is offering you, it is vast and complete, and you just need to take the time to take it and realise it.