Introduction to Natural Yoga
In the Western world it is not considered very important to use our hearts. I
think underneath we would all like to be more able to love, and be loved, but we have
learned to use our heads. We have been educated, not only in our educational system,
but also in our society – as a whole cultural way of proceeding – to use our heads. It
has brought us a certain degree of material success, but it has not succeeded in giving
us the happiness, the peace, the consciousness and the love that we all want.
The teaching of Natural Yoga, the way of natural union with God, which I
learned from my spiritual teacher Master Kripalvananda, is a method of opening your
heart, of surrender. This is not to say that knowledge is a bad thing, because it is not.
But it is not enough. For that matter, just to open your heart is not enough either. But
we are so much further ahead in our heads than in our hearts that what we need to
learn is to open that heart and surrender.
But surrender to what? If we just surrender, will we not be done in and
overrun by life, by other people‟s neuroses if not our own? Therefore in Natural Yoga
one surrenders to the Truth. Another name for the Truth is God, and another name for
God is the Absolute. Another name for the Absolute is Perfection, and another name
for Perfection is Truth. And if you have never experienced any of those things, other
than intellectually or in books, then it makes it difficult to know what all that is about.
This is what Natural Yoga is all about – surrender to God.
We become hard-hearted because the world takes advantage of us or hurts us,
and we close up, sooner or later. We need to re-release the energy that is captured by
closing the heart. The heart is captured by the mind; the mind controls it. When the
heart‟s energy is controlled, and then you begin to get tense, get headaches and feel
unhappy. Nothing feels good or has any point to it any more. When you re-open your
heart, the mind loses its grip on that energy, and life begins to flow again.
When this happens, then ordinary life is not much effort. If you give your
heart to Jesus, it tends to happen for a few days or weeks. If you do a weekend
workshop and throw yourself into it, you tend to open up. In Reichian work, if you
surrender some and let the streaming of the energy happen, then you will be more
open. These are all steps in the right direction. But you certainly cannot figure your
way into how to liberate that life energy that has been entrapped. The more you use
your will to make it happen,