Unified Mind A little about this lineage…
Below are just four lines with long names, if you are a skim/speed reader you may come to grief on one of the corners, read slowly so as to not do your head in.
Satyananda came to Australia the year I was born… it is from his name that Satyananda Yoga comes. Satyananda was initiated into the secrets of yoga by Swami Sivananda Saraswati. Swami Satyananda initiated Swami Niranjanananda Saraswati, who is now the preceptor in succession to Swami Satyananda. I was initiated by Swami Niranjanananda.
Simply, it looks like this: Sivananda –> Satyananda –> Niranjanananda –> Yogamanas along with many others. Along with Satyananda, Sivananda initiated many others. As did Satyananda including Niranjanananda, and Niranjanananda many others including me. I am one of many drops in the pool of this lineage.
Satyananda Yoga is a meditative, systematic style of yoga that moves naturally, progressing from the gross aspects of ourselves to the subtle. Developing finer states of awareness and experience.
What is Yoga?
So many definitions, all pointing to the same thing. I will put in just a few. The word yoga = union
Sivananda has said, ‘Yoga is the integration and harmony between thoughts, words and deeds, or integration between head, heart and hands’.
Satyananda has said that, depending on which level of experience you are viewing yoga from, it could be seen as: Physical harmony and health or mental balance and mental peace, or that yoga may be seen not really as union, but that the realisation of the union already existing is the culmination of yoga. Another, that yoga ‘encompasses both a method and it’s end point’, ‘a method or path which one adopts to attain the realisation of yoga, of one’s true identity’. He has also said that ‘the definition of yoga will be perhaps a little different for each practitioner, for the individual will relate to yogic experiences and hence explain them in different ways’.
This last is nicely summed up by Swami Niranjanananda who has said that Yoga is ‘a system of personal experience’.
A classic text, the Bhagavad Gita says yoga is:
Equanimity in success and failure.
Skill and efficiency in action.
The supreme secret of life.
The giver of untold happiness.
Serenity.
The destroyer of pain.
