“All Life is Yoga…”—Sri Aurobindo
NAMAH—The Journal of Integral Health and Sri Aurobindo Centre for Advanced Research (SACAR) jointly organized a ‘Living Within’ Study Camp on August 25–26, 2018, titled ‘Yoga as a Way of Living’.
To do Yoga is to grow and live consciously through the many distractions of everyday life. To transform our lives, we must integrate it into every facet of our daily existence: family, career, rest, play, duty and love.
The seminar looked at the way the Integral Yoga enhances and gives true meaning to our daily existence. If we allow the sadhana to work through us at all times, even our most mundane activities can be taken up and transformed. The conditions are a steadfast sincerity and surrender. As this happens, our happiness and well-being increases and every facet of life becomes sacred and spiritualized.
As the sadhana shifts us inside, every aspect on the outside radically changes too. This is an aim of the Integral Yoga and all these outward activities can become a mirror to our deepest inner Truth. Quite apart from anything else, it helps us discharge our responsibilities in a more conscious and effective manner.
During the two days, held in a beautiful and fragrant atmosphere, all the speaker through their interactions with participants, shared insights and experiences, explored the way the sadhana touches and elevates every facet of our existence and explicated practical ways to embark on this journey. Its role in the workplace was examined in great depth. One session was dedicated to, and reflected upon, how the Yoga can master and transmute the quality of our relationships. In another, we looked at how the vibration of our love refines and expands as we consciously live the Yoga of Love. Every aspect of our living becomes a more vivid reflection of the Truth. The Integral Yoga transforms every aspect of our way of living.
The sessions were interspaced with many collective and individual discussions and meditative moments. In all, it was a seminar which helped most participants understand the following truth, as told to us by Sri Aurobindo:
“By Yoga we can rise out of falsehood into truth, out of weakness into force, out of pain and grief into bliss, out of bondage into freedom, out of death into immortality, out of darkness into light, out of confusion into purity, out of imperfection into perfection, out of self-division into unity, out of Maya into God. All other utilisation of Yoga is for special and fragmentary advantages not always worth pursuing. Only that which aims at possessing the fullness of God is purna Yoga; the sadhaka of the Divine Perfection is the purna Yogin.”—SRI AUROBINDO
