The Twelve Yoga Forms of The Light of Being
- Anandajay
- Apr 3
- 10 min read
Updated: Apr 4
From the perspective of The Light of Being, yoga is offered in various forms, as is customary in India based on their Vedic culture. By connecting with the essence (yoga) and opening to its inner guidance in one's life and work, various aspects of connectedness become clear. The way in which these are passed on by me is through initiation. This means that people are introduced and initiated, and that they are only initiated into its principles. From there, they will mature by continually engaging with it in a more sensitive way, rather than in a knowledge-oriented way. As most people are not used to living in connection, ongoing personal guidance is highly recommended. In naming these forms of yoga of "The Light of Being," I have chosen mostly English terms, because they often express the substance so compactly and eloquently. Below are the aspects of yoga offered by The Light of Being that can support your personal and spiritual development.
1. The ‘LightMessenger’, the messenger
The LightMessenger falls within the scope of Jnana Yoga, the yoga of knowledge that comes to light through contact with the essential. This messenger yoga speaks to the guiding aspect in people. It is about consciously or subconsciously guiding yourself and others on your or their path through life on the basis of illuminating insights. How do you offer such a message in such a way that the essence is still conveyed, and how do you ensure that the other person does not interpret this essential knowledge in an ego-driven way and use it for ego-driven purposes?
The messenger tries to keep the knowledge of the Essence as pure as possible, which is different from a fundamentalist approach, because the word pure here means that all human experience remains gently connected to the Essence.
2. The ‘PeaceBreathing’, the peace breathing
Breathing and peace are closely related. Breathing is the foundation, and letting your breath flow freely brings your breathing rhythm into a natural balance. This helps you to enter a state of being in which you feel peace, enjoy peace and pass it on through your actions. PeaceBreathing is an all-encompassing way of being in touch with the breath, bringing together all forms of pranayama, Sanskrit for breath control, to help people regain balance and peace.
This form of yoga generally falls under the scope of Hatha Yoga, the yoga of the balance of the body. Hatha Yoga is generally known as regular yoga, and is about living, being still, and moving from a place of connection with the deeper experience of "being here." The body is seen as an experiential realm that serves you in this life to know everything you encounter as a reflection of the highest value of your presence. Tantra yoga, the yoga of energetic balance, also uses conscious breathing exercises to promote energetic exchange.
3. The ‘LovesharingTantra’, the Healing Power of Relationships
LovesharingTantra is a form of yoga that invites you to experience the connection with your essence through the affective freedom of your heart and energy field. The spiritual heart is the source of compassion and affection, which has a soothing effect on the manifesting power of your ego. This makes your energy field more permeable and transparent, making it easier for you to connect and interact with your fellow human beings and your environment.
Sharing and exchanging love from your heart through your energy field to the world around you, and allowing it to flow back to you from that world, reconnects you with the love that is your essence and being. It feels incredibly rich to live in connection with this love, and your whole attitude to life is influenced by this relationship.
This practice falls under both Tantra Yoga, the yoga of weaving polarities, and Bhakti Yoga, the yoga of love and devotion. In LovesharingTantra, devotion is meant as a refined attention to the deeper connection with yourself and your fellow human beings, which then automatically enriches your interaction with everything.
4. The ‘MantraPrayers’, Devotional Gestures and Prayers of Gratitude
The MantraPrayers The MantraPrayers are a form of yoga in which various prayers of gratitude, accompanied by music and hand, arm and head gestures, help you to connect more deeply with the spiritual richness of life and the feeling of being supported as you open to the connection with the Essence in yourself and in life. Gratitude is one of the most joyful human emotions, and the sensitive depth of the gestures can help you open more deeply to the values for which you are grateful and the essence to which they call attention.
This form of connection also falls within the scope of both Bhakti Yoga, the yoga of devotion and dedication to the essence within ourselves and in everything around us, and Mantra Yoga, the yoga of the voice and the soul. For many people, there is an unknown quality to devotion and mantras. This has to do with letting go of your personal needs. This allows you to descend to a deeper layer within yourself, and from there you can solemnly and with reverence and love devote yourself to the love that comes to you from your soul and from life.
5. The ‘SoulGuidance’, the Spiritual Guide
SoulGuidance is a form of yoga that falls within the scope of both Karma Yoga and Kriya Yoga. Karma Yoga asks you to live with the awareness of how your actions will work out in the long run, so that you can feel whether they are truly in alignment with what you or the person you are guiding truly long for. Kriya Yoga is about actually living and acting from your connection to the essential, so that all thinking, feeling, and doing can be inspired by it, both in your own actions and in those of the person you are guiding as your friend.
As a spiritual guide, you then guide someone from your contact with the essential. As a kind of angel – someone who is in touch with the essential nature of life – you guide someone on a kind of pilgrimage, a pilgrim who walks contemplatively towards a goal that is connected to his or her essence, to deepen his or her contact with the inner self and to bring his or her way of life more in line with those inner values. Your own process of awakening and openness to being connected to your essential nature plays an important role in this form of guidance, so that your own needs, opinions and interpretations do not interfere with the freedom and beauty of this unique process of the awakening human being.
6. The ‘SacredDance’, a Communal Sacred Dance
SacredDance is a form of dance that combines Hatha, Bhakti and Tantra Yoga. Hatha Yoga is about using your body as a temple. Bhakti Yoga is about devotion and a deep love for what is essential. Tantra Yoga is about the charm of experiencing wholeness in every area of your life. These dance movements are a kind of prayer of attraction experienced through the graceful and free movements of your body.
In our mantra music, respect for your spiritual longing for wholeness and the sensuality of your longing for wholeness come together in a choreography that depicts experiences of internalization and makes them more deeply felt. It is a group choreography that at different moments invites you to connect deeply with each other, but also lets you feel that you, as a part of the whole and embedded in the safety and security of the group, can feel completely at home in your own being..
7. The ‘AuraAwakening’, Reading the Radiance of your Soul
The soul radiates light and the openness, freedom and transparency of your humanity determines how broken (color) or unbroken (white) that radiation becomes. The different ways in which the light is broken by your mood and the truth of the moment determine the colors that you can then read in your energetic field. The coloring and drawing of this aura in AuraAwakening and connecting with it in this way falls within the scope of Tantra Yoga, the yoga of weaving dualities that can also be experienced as energies..
You then express the energetic, spiritual vibrations you experience through color and harmonic forms. In practice, this means that you use pre-drawn human figures to feel where and how your energies flow and what colors they have during various spiritual experiences such as meditation, wholeness, devotion and freedom. Learning to feel, see and recognize the energies within and around you in this way brings you into a different, more subtle relationship with yourself. Beyond the psychological and personal, you feel your energetic space, a deeper reality of your existence. The colors you paint create a drawing that acts as a mirror reflecting your connection to your being. This mirror gives you deep insight and affection for who you are.
This form of yoga is closely related to mantra yoga, expressions of connection to your essence through voice and sound that set deeper energetic and spiritual vibrations in motion.
8. The ‘KoshaMassage’, a Hapto-Energetic Massage of your Soul Energies
The KoshaMassage is a massage that has an opening effect on the different koshas, which are energetic layers or mantles around your soul. This form of connecting with your being through the softening of your koshas is part of both Tantra and Bhakti Yoga. Tantra Yoga focuses on the experience of duality coming together through the experience of the attraction of oneness, while Bhakti Yoga supports you in opening up to the extraordinary love of the essential through devotion.
Through various energetic movements and physical touches, the layers of physicality, energetic flow, life force, insight and essential love are released from their densification and you experience the light, charm and loving value of your soul more and more clearly.
9. The ‘ChakraHealing’, a Relational Form of Energetic Restoration
ChakraHealing is of course a form of yoga because it makes you more whole. This is especially true in this relational form, where the connection between giver and receiver is seen as immensely valuable. The energy of being is offered through seventy energetic doorways (portals), and only when the recipient wishes to receive the energy offered can it have a healing effect in the body. Giver and receiver are completely equal in this process, and the receiver is always asked if he or she truly wishes to accept the energy offered.
Human sovereignty and freedom are fully respected in this process. It is precisely this affective respect that creates a deeper openness in both people, allowing the energetic nourishment of the healing to be fully consciously absorbed and used for energetic restoration and balance. This is also a form of Tantra Yoga and creates a respectful atmosphere of being together in wholeness.
10. De ‘HeartSinging’, Expressions of Your Spiritual Heart
HeartSinging is a form of yoga that invites you to express sounds and mantras in a devotional way, based on your connection to your spiritual heart, expressing your connection to your essence. Spiritual feelings are very sensitive, and not all means of expression are suited to these nuanced feelings. Singing sounds that you feel within and mantras that are meaningful to you allow you to express your experience of connection to the essential in an intense and fulfilling way.
You can express this in a meditative, rhythmic, or ecstatic way, depending on the layer at which you are touched and the experience of devotion originates. The mantras used can be in many languages and convey different values, but they always speak to the richness and value of spiritual depth. This value can only be expressed in close connection with your heart, for it touches you affectively and gives space to the beauty and clarity of your sincerity.
This form of connection can be celebrated intensely and is covered by both Mantra Yoga, which nurtures your connection with the essential through tones, sounds, and meanings, and Bhakti Yoga, which connects you with your essential nature through the values of spiritual vibrations and devotion.
11. The ‘Meditatie’, the Loving Relationship Between You and Your Soul
Meditation means “to be in the middle of” and invites you to enter into, commune with, and silently enjoy the experience of being together with your inner being, with your soul. The ego and the soul are both "you." The ego is your surface and the soul is your depth. When these two layers open up to each other in a loving relationship, you find yourself in their midst, in the center, at home with yourself. It is a loving relationship because that is where the longing for togetherness and the energy of love are most strongly experienced, so the meditation brings about a very charming spiritual feeling of oneness and love.
The Light of Being-Meditation is a form of yoga that falls within the scope of Raja Yoga, which means to be together and still with your being and to be reverently open to it. This direct and yearning contact with your soul requires few resources, although a mantra can be helpful to become sensitive enough to this intimacy of love and peace. Raja means king, and opening yourself to be one with your soul in stillness, based on your personal identifications and goals, is seen as a dignified, royal descent and homecoming into the realm of your essential individuality, your home. The stillness of such a meditation has a calming influence on all that you are usually concerned with, provided that you experience the relationship with your soul as a love relationship, so that your experience is connected to the depth and liveliness of affection.
12. The ‘ShantiYoga’, the Embracing of Form and Content
The ShantiYoga, which I have developed on the basis of more than fifty years of experience, is meditative in nature. The postures used in it are evolutionary, meaning that they are derived from the developmental stages from the embryo to the toddler, or elementary, meaning that the yoga postures have been brought back to the twelve foundational movement possibilities of the adult human being. ShantiYoga makes use of the tangibility of the body and its mobility as well as the conscious and empathic experience of the relationship to the essential within.
In terms of external form, ShantiYoga falls within the scope of Hatha Yoga, but its spiritual depth is due to the refined integration of all forms of yoga. In many yoga practices, people often get stuck in the attention to balance without being guided to the essence that lies underneath. If form and substance merely embrace each other, it becomes superficial again, but if the embrace causes the polarity of the two to dissolve and form and substance in being together open up to the depth of their connection, only then does one experience the essence of both, of existence. If the yoga guidance is allowed to go that deep, this yoga will connect you with the true underneath the temporary, with the support underneath the created, with your soul underneath your self.
* Translated from Dutch using DeepL (AI)
Translation of the text: Yoga beleven en geven vanuit zijn Spirituele Diepgang, 25. Spirituele ontwikkeling, De twaalf Teachings. (Only available in Dutch.)
Anandajay (which means “blessing from the heart”) has been dedicated to integrating the spiritual essence into daily life for over 50 years. He has developed twelve teachings (spiritual practices), 50 music albums (mantras, pujas and ragas) and twenty books (written in Dutch) to bring you closer to the natural basis of your existence, your spiritual authenticity, and its wholesome, joyful essence, so that it can also be your shining, spiritual guide in your life. He expresses the core value of his work as: The Light of Being.