Finding The Right School Of Yoga

There are a number of different schools of yoga, all with a slightly different emphasis.
However, underlying all schools is an emphasis on relaxation. In this article we will discuss the Bhakti school of yoga and the Raja school of yoga.

Watch a kitten at play: it wakes from a cat-nap, stretches, arches its back, yawns prodigiously, flicks its tail and instantly is chasing it. Whether or not it succeeds doesn't seem to matter. Next it will leap after a fly, change its mind, flop over and with the greatest nonchalance start washing a seemingly inaccessible spot in the middle of its back. Soon it is once more curled up in a ball or stretched out leggy and limp, one open eye proclaiming that it is not asleep -- just relaxing.

The disciplines of all schools of yoga encourage the practitioner to achieve just this degree of relaxation. One such school is Bhakti yoga. This is a system of intense devotion, with emphasis on faith. The true follower of Bhakti is one who is free from both guilt and egoism. He is humble, unaffected by either happiness or sorrow, and hasn't a single enemy. Greed, injustice, rashness, persecution of others, jealousy, stealing, harsh words and cruelty are foreign to him. His heart is pure. He has faith, innocence, simplicity and absolute truthfulness.

By Western norms he would be considered a saint, with this addition: the Bhakti Yogi considers it as much a sin to waste time as to waste talents -- to him sins of omission are as great as those of commission.

Next we come to the second school of yoga, Raja yoga which, translated literally, means "King of Yogas." Raja yoga takes its disciple through eight stages, all of them highly spiritual and so complex we shall not attempt to discuss any except the final one, Samadhi, This is a state of bliss wherein the mind is withdrawn from all earthly attachments. By then the Yogi has learned to stop his thinking processes so completely that his consciousness is absorbed into the Infinite.

Just as a river flows inevitably to the sea, so the individual mind merges into the ocean of Absolute Consciousness. Those who have achieved Samadhi claim there are no words to describe the experience -- apparently it can only be felt. In the state of Samadhi the Yogi sees without eyes, tastes without tongue, hears without ears, smells without nose, touches without contact. Sound and form are no more, suffering and ignorance disappear, and the Yogi attains Kaivalya or supreme liberation from earthly limitations.

In this state, the Yogi is supposedly able to free his astral body or etheric double from his physical body. Raja yoga may be thought of as the synthesis of all the systems of yoga as a whole.

The gaining of a healthy body and a mind calm and passive under all circumstances is common to all yogas. Control of one's mental processes as well as of the emotions is a basic common goal. This is achieved partly through conscious disciplines, partly by releasing the undercurrents of the mind at rest -- or, to borrow psychological terminology, by giving play to the subconscious.

In our own Occidental utilitarian terms, then, yoga techniques offer us the means for better Self-realization in the realm of the physical, the mental, the emotional and the spiritual. It is a royal road to inner power. Choose one school of yoga and your life will be enhanced.