Yoga: Union with Essence

Union

After all these years of spiritual teaching, one of the most important aspects of my humanity and my work as a spiritual teacher is the value to unite, to connect. Binding is restrictive and limiting, but uniting is about the connections that can arise in the space around you. Unity dissolves the isolation of stand-alone bulwarks, creates openness, and through the exchange that can then take place, there is access to enrichment (such as through relationships with other people and other cultures) and maturation (such as through nourishment, warmth, and light). A connection gives people an energetic thread through which to interact and relate to others and to the things around them. This creates an opportunity to open up, receive, share, meet, experience influence, mingle, be together, and thereby experience what drives people: love and happiness. So it actually creates the opportunity to awaken from the isolation of being alone, of standing alone, of being closed off. This is where life begins, as well as development, the expansion of consciousness, and the blossoming of the deeper potential value of humanity, because it begins through the presence and contact with another human being.

Coming out of your isolation

A union is like the outstretched hand of life, wherever it may come from. Everything that exists is energetically extending its hand to you, inviting you to open up, to free yourself, to blossom, to enrich yourself, and to become part of the whole. It is the hand of compassion and affection that wants to break through your isolation and loneliness and encourage your consciousness to unfold, expand and open. Life is a relationship, it is the hand of relating, connecting and engaging with everything around you. In life, from the first moment to the last, you are always connected, in relationship with something. It is up to you how you relate to this, if and for which "hands" you open yourself and discover what they offer you, or if you reject these "hands of life" and withdraw into yourself. This question will be with you every moment as a constant invitation to relate and develop. It is the freedom you have been given to let your life have the quality you wish to experience.

Spiritual connection

When the connection with life can be deepened in openness in such a way that you open yourself to the relationship with your essence, this connection becomes spiritual. If you are willing to open yourself to the relationship with what life is offering you and allow it to go deeper and deeper, there will come a moment when you will also be in touch with the innermost part of yourself. You can only feel this most essential part if you sincerely give your permission to be touched by your attention, your awareness, or the hand of life. This permission comes from your deep longing to connect with this essence, and it is a deeply human longing that continues to inspire all of our actions until we come home to our essential value as human beings and feel that through this connection we are once again part of all of life.

Meetings cause development

The more we engage in this spiritual union and experience the essence within us, the more we recognize this depth and essence in everything around us. In our fellow human beings, in nature, in everything, we recognize the same source and how immensely deep, fulfilling, valuable, whole and therefore sacred it is. Many want to find this union very quickly, but forget that it only becomes accessible when one is willing to let go of the self-defensive armor of the ego, to leave one's own bulwark, and to allow, receive, and embrace the outstretched hand of life. Spirituality begins with ending your isolation and relating and engaging with everything you meet. Under the influence of something else, there is space to thaw from your rigidity and single-mindedness and thus develop. A connection that is also loving allows you to open up more deeply than usual and unfold, layer by layer, the identification and self-protection that come from insecurity, all forms of unnecessary rigidity and tension. This can be compared to a flower bulb releasing all of its layers so that a plant can emerge and then form relationships with everything it meets. May you, too, develop in this way, interacting affectively with everything you meet.

Yoga as an Invitation

Union, the freedom from isolation, fear or hardening, the liberation from separation and thus finding space for togetherness, reconnecting with the whole, establishing a relationship with what one meets, is called yoga in Sanskrit. Although yoga has become a familiar concept and no longer raises eyebrows, this does not mean that people have a better understanding of what yoga is. Perhaps it is time to rediscover yoga in its original meaning and value for a more peaceful and loving society. After all, yoga was born out of humanity's desire for harmony and the precious influence of the essence of existence. So let us delve deeper into yoga as an “invitation to unite.”

The Meaning of Yoga

For clarity, let us start at the beginning. The word yoga means union and is related to our word yoke (to join). It is about making a connection to achieve a union or completeness that is originally remembered but has been pushed into the background by circumstances. Yogis were not masters of difficult physical postures or people who performed extraordinary feats, but individuals who tried to rediscover the inner harmony they were missing through meditation, inner sensitivity, and contemplative reflection on the question of their origin and essence. They sought to reconnect deeply with their beginnings, literally to remember themselves, to rediscover the essence of their existence. This is also the literal meaning of the word religion, as it means to re-read, to feel, and to be open to what is truly essential. The word meditation literally means to return to the center and allow harmony to arise around you as the focal point.

The fact that yoga is known primarily for its physical postures, relaxation, and positive effects on stress and the like indicates that the means and effects have become more important than the inner intentions, that the external forms and results have become more important than the value of the connection that led to them. This is not so strange, since the physical value of yoga was discovered both in India and certainly in the West as an answer to health problems related to the disturbed balance between tension and relaxation. This shifted attention from inner intention to effect, and thus from the desire for essence to the success-oriented interests of the ego.

Reflection or effects

Perhaps the value of yoga cannot be fully understood or comprehended from an effect-oriented mindset, just as there is often a visible gap between people who live more reflectively and people who are primarily focused on effects. This can be seen, for example, in their approaches to medicine or the environment. The two look in different directions. The reflective or contemplative person looks for value in the principles of life and existence, while the effect-oriented person looks for ways to get what he wants. The former feels that he must first connect with what is important in order to know how to approach life, while the latter feels that circumstances must first be improved and, within that order, feel how best to approach everything. Both have their value, of course, but a person may find one more important than the other at different times, depending on experience or how one's sensitivity develops. Yoga means union, and this also means that the best way to unite these aspects is to free them from their beliefs. It would be beneficial if both could be given respect and space, so that together they are more than the sum of their parts.

Yoga as Quality of Life

Now that yoga is about engaging in a deeper quality of life, can it really be that instead of stripping it down and focusing only on its positive effects, because in the long run we might lose sight of those positive effects, it will fall silent in its remaining emptiness, like many other things that we milk too one-sidedly for their effect. Therefore, yoga is always involved when some form of union with the essential is experienced. When a conversation connects you, the other, or both of you to the essential values of your existence, it is yoga. When being in nature touches you and you feel closer to yourself, that is yoga. If placing a small flower next to a picture that is dear to you brings you more peace and harmony, that is yoga, and so on. So it is not about the form, it is about what happens and whether it feels internalizing or wholesome. This can also be done through your bodily experience and dealing with the body through various postures that support the body's mobility. The question of yoga is whether the way you deal with it connects you more deeply with the essential, harmonious, fundamental or whatever you wish to call it.

In order to feel whether something, an action, or a posture is connecting you more with the deeper or more essential values within you, you need to feel, experience, and sense what is actually happening within you. To orient yourself, you need your sensitivity. You are then asked to use this sensitivity to feel the interaction, the relationship, between what you are doing and whether it creates more or less connection. In other words, you are invited to create a deeper relationship between what you meet and what you do, and the inner depths where the harmonious can be experienced. To open yourself in this way to your sensitivity and the meeting between you and what you do, you must let go of your preconceptions, beliefs, and judgments. Not so much because they are ethically irresponsible, but because they severely limit the openness of your sensitivity and relational experience.

Herein lies the beauty and enrichment of what yoga can offer you, but it also makes many people aware of their fear of engaging in experiences where they do not yet know what they will do to them and what they will bring about, thus losing their mental and emotional footing. In general, people would rather build up what they perceive as a reinforcement of their manifestation than open themselves up to the unknown, which they feel makes them more fragile and sensitive. Of course, this is also the reason why people prefer to focus on the effects of yoga rather than the longing for the union with their inner being.

Light of Being-Yoga

Through Light of Being Yoga (ShantiYoga) is developed in a way that emphasizes this reflective and original side of yoga. Through this yoga, out of a longing for your essential nature, for the deeper values of life, and out of a sense of commitment to humanity and the world, you open yourself to deeply touching questions of life in order to connect with the most valuable aspects of your existence. Yoga, which creates connections based on a longing for more unity, contributes to both the individual and the world as a whole. For both, the greatest yearning is to experience more peace and to make the valuable aspects of life so accessible that everyone respects them in each other. Of course, this process begins with experiencing more harmony, peace and love, the consequences of more unity, within oneself. Therefore, people must first become joyful through their connection to what is essential, for then they will feel that it is true. From there, they will gain the power to live according to those values and to spread that happiness into the world through their actions and sharing. Yoga, connecting with the deeper layers of your being and recognizing those values as what you truly long for, makes you happy and lets you live from that happiness. This is how it should be, because without being immersed in something, without being rooted in something, you cannot live from it, it will not naturally become part of your way of life, and you will only talk about it instead of living from it.

The same goes for doing asanas, the physical postures of yoga, and other forms of yoga. You have to connect with your essence first, so that the way you interact with your body can be sensitive from that connectedness, from opening up to it and feeling your relationship with it. The idea that just doing the exercises will bring you into yoga is as mistaken as the idea that placing flowers at a picture that is considered precious will make you devote. It is possible if you allow a moment of deep openness, but doing the exercises alone will not necessarily have this internalizing effect. Sitting quietly does not necessarily lead to meditation, but if you are sensitive and connect with your inner self in a free moment, you may find yourself in a deep meditation.

Relationship

Yoga, connectedness or being together, is about being in a relationship. Being in a relationship means that you are willing to give up some living space for the sake of a sincere exchange, so that you are open to receiving the other and allowing space for it to take place within you. In this sense, a relationship, an exchange or an interaction, one's engagement with and openness to someone or something, requires that you have the freedom to let go and allow another energy to enter you and mingle with your own. These are difficult questions for the ego because it does not like to give up anything of itself, but for the deeper essence of you that yoga seeks to answer, this is a blessing because through this letting go and allowing something else to come so close, you learn to trust more and more in a much deeper foundation of your existence. You then discover that what you call yourself has many layers and extends from the superficial ego, which is so useful for functioning in the world, to the very core of your true self, soul or being, where all existential being feels at home and you feel connected to all other existence as your true family.

So may every form of yoga be understood as a wish to reconnect with the originality, essential nature or elemental quality of being within oneself as a living life. And may this wish be embraced without the intention of achieving anything, because the quest for internalization goes astray in the pursuit of your image of a goal, creating no sensitivity, no relationship and no connection, but merely seeking, analyzing and observing, thus remaining distant and detached from what you meet and connect with. After all, connection is a kind of intimacy, because you are a participating part of that connection, not a detached observer. And wholeness is even more of an intimacy, for how can there be wholeness if part of it remains separate and outside as a spectator?

Harmony as beginning

Yoga asks the questions that the driven effect seeker does not ask. Questions about uniting instead of separating, about sensitivity instead of willpower, about relation instead of power, about intimacy instead of possession, about wholeness instead of division. Questions that, regardless of their answers, address a completely different level of existence and your life's meaning. Questions that do not get you very far with enthusiasm and goal-orientedness, and that keep you slipping into frustration. Questions that ask for disarmament instead of armament, that ask for meeting something instead of having to do something. Whether you sing mantras, meditate, experience the relationship with your body, do charity work, devote yourself to inner values, honor wisdom, explore sexuality as sacred fertility, or open yourself to the energetic layers of your existence, it is only a form of yoga if you first connect with the essence of yourself as the one experiencing it. Then you will feel the harmony that is taking place within you, and you will be able to deal with all aspects of creation from that place.

Therefore, in Light of Being Yoga you will also learn to engage with your body from the union with your being, from yoga. From the value of that union you then enter into a relationship with everything you become aware of through this living organism. These may be habitual patterns that you recognize as automatisms, often without even being aware of why they are so active within you, and which you can become aware of when they truly serve your longing for harmony. These automatisms can be unconscious forms of rigidity, inhibition, old dogmas, and rejection. Yoga can also help you to experience more clearly the gold mines of vitality, love and depth. Whatever may become perceptible through your openness, the connection with your being, yourself or your source remains the most important part, because without it you may not even understand what you are becoming aware of in terms of inner value, and the insights gained through it may not be able to fall into place in the unity that you are.

Awakening

The name "Light of Being" of course indicates that it is about the light of awareness, which is a completely different light than the light with which you want to become or achieve. The Light of Being-Yoga wants to connect you with your own and life's intrinsic value and invites people to feel their longing for yoga, for connection, unity and harmony, and to give it space to become a reality within them. A living reality in the here and now, not later, but in the present and in relation to everything life offers you. Because the insight into your true longing, the freedom to be sensitive and to connect affectively with life, yourself and others, plays such a large role in letting it become true, it is part of all 'Light of Being' teachings, and therefore also of yoga. Without this process of personal awakening to your essence, there is too great a chance that you will be swept away by the collective mentality of becoming, making and achieving that is so prevalent in the world around you, even in the name of yoga and despite your deep longing for wholeness. This one-sided, goal-driven orientation does not leave enough space for your longing to connect with your inner self. May we, therefore, through this yoga guidance, sincerely address the longing for essence again, and who knows, it may bring them together to serve each other in yoga.

Yoga as way of life

Yoga is a way of life, a longing to live from a place of connection with the substance and essence within. All aspects of life are sensitively felt, so that it becomes clear to what extent the connection with the essential plays a role in how you feel, think and act in the moment. This develops a refined discernment that leads to understanding, compassion, and wise mildness.

From such a way of living, everything you experience is seen as a meeting, as a partner, so that you are in a relationship with it. You always give that which you are experiencing the space to be itself, to show itself, to reveal itself. You then notice how you react to this "other" and this willingness to reflect opens you to what drives, inspires and stimulates you to live the way you do. This develops a deep insight into your underlying habits, needs and conditioning, which creates respect, depth and realism.

Such a sensitive relational approach makes you increasingly aware of yourself as the center of everything. After all, nothing could be experienced or encountered without your presence. All of creation, the world, and our experiences are only here because you are here, because you are human, and because you have consciousness. This creates a sense of spiritual presence that leads to meditation, inner peace and dignity.

Gratitude

Because the body is constantly using sensations to inform you of what is happening inside of you, it is a distinct and useful area of focus to greet everything you meet with gratitude. With gratitude because it gives you the peace and freedom that a meeting needs to be truly understood. If you were to judge everything you meet based on interpretations, many meetings would immediately fall out of reach because of all the rejection. Gratitude is a positive and respectful attitude towards life because it allows you to open your heart, to welcome what is given to you and to feel that you have been given something. Gratitude is a quality that, thanks to an attitude like yoga, becomes more and more real to you and makes you happier, because it is one of the values that makes people the happiest.

Gratitude, like other experiences you have, can only be experienced through your body and its more or less finely developed senses. The body is so close to you, as the center that experiences everything, that you can hardly distance yourself from it. In fact, the body is the closest thing to you and nothing and no one comes closer to you than this living body. The breath that massages your inner being, the blood that flows throughout your body and the nerve energies that give you their sensitivity everywhere you go. Your body is like a mantle around your soul, like a nourishing bath in which you rest, like a constant experience of intimacy with yourself. That is why yoga, connectedness with the essential, is so fascinating and intimate, especially in relation to this all-reflecting body, qualities that are indispensable for a true meeting. This develops a more refined form of energetic and tantric awareness, an extremely refined experience of the flowing life energies within the fully conscious experience of your presence.

The essential and changeable

The body is, of course, perishable and not an eternal source of essence; nevertheless, it is a viable source for examining one's relationship to the essence, which makes the body to exist and experience existence. How else can we get to know the essential nature of reality than by freely experiencing it in a world of duality, of differences between what it is and what it is not? It is not pleasant to experience when the body has defects and is subject to decay. This is something you cannot escape, but it carries a spiritual message, because if the body were permanent, human beings would interpret their body as essentiality, preventing them from descending into the depths of their essence, soul, being or existence. We would also not experience something permanent as intimacy, because intimacy is always related to the perishable, the changeable, the living. So if the body were a fixed and unchanging stable given, the sense of intimacy would fade and we would be less affective toward it. Understanding all this does not make the impermanence of the body any less true, but it can lead you to recognize early on the distinction between the essential and the impermanent and therefore to live more in yoga, so that the reality of it unfolds and is experienced differently. Life is, after all, as it is, but by living in yoga, your orientation changes, and so you experience everything differently, you get different things out of it, and everything takes on an entirely different light.

When you live in yoga, when you are united with your essence, you have a compass, so to speak, that is oriented towards the essence of life and towards you, because you are also living life, with you, in you. Yoga is the love of this connection to the essential and the essential in you, and the feeling that from there you are connected to everything and the essential in everything. Yoga nurtures this connection, respects the depth that comes from it, and carries a wholesome, home-bringing quality for anyone and anything that feels like a loner, an orphan, a lost one, or a seeker. Yoga connects people, life, everything to its source and lets you live in the light of that original energy, in the light of being.

* Translated from Dutch using DeepL (AI)

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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.