The Complete Yoga Community

With a plethora of insta-fixes, personal growth programmes and right-now remedies available out there, Yogachistaha Christine Henley enlightens us on choosing the right one for you

Achieving enlightenment in the Buddha’s day must surely have been a lot simpler than today. He undoubtedly was not on somebody’s mailing list, bombarded regularly with alternative lifestyles offering courses in How-To-Get-There, What-To-Eat, What-To-Drink, What-To-Chant, What-To-Take-On-Your-Astral-Travels, How-To-Clean-Your-Aura, How-To-Communicate-With-Your-Personal-Guru, How-To-Improve-Your-Potential etc. His choices were somewhat more limited and simple I imagine – like to Eat-Or-Not-Eat.

Anorexia didn’t work, neither did his bouts of over-indulgence. And, despite his initial attempts to find answers from apparent masters, he eventually came to the conclusion that nobody out there was able to offer him a quick-fix for nirvana. So he knew When-To-Quit. And this he did in probable irritation and frustration sitting under the now-famous Bo tree.

That is where I am right now – Quitting-The-Cosmic-Con-Artists. I don’t want to hear about another miracle cure, another reason to change my diet, another method for Astral Travel, another confrontation with my total lack of comprehension for Getting-There…

Being a practitioner of yoga seems to have automatically targeted me for cosmic counselling of one sort or another. I receive letters in my inbox and phone calls from terribly well-meaning souls, all claiming to have the very latest solution for personal growth and development – an instant fix for finding myself.

There are methods to erase your negative karma with special chanting; to heal yourself and others with a Japanese secret initiation; to change your aura and your life with coloured oils; to walk on hot coals and realise your potential; to drink this green stuff from China, this brown stuff from Sweden, this vitamin and that oil; to join an encounter group and find yourself… and so it continues with ever-increasing momentum. And the one thing that really amazes me is the cost of all these miracles!

Shakyamuni definitely had it easier. Not being subject to all these temptations – he was, after all, forced to turn within and find his own salvation. And that, of course, is what we all have to do.

I have always had difficulty believing that God/The Supreme Consciousness/Universal Mind would have tossed us down here to fight our way through the jungle of external and mostly costly “solutions” and then wait and see how clever we could be to find the right one. I believe that everything that is natural and free in the world around us was placed here for our benefit, survival and joy: to drink in the fragrance of the flowers and imbibe their colours for healing and nurturing; to look to nature for our sustenance in terms of food and drink; to exercise the body gently and to learn to feel what is right for each of us: to tread “the middle path”.

I too believe that those ancient seers who must have pondered over the cosmos and what it is all about, evolved their own solutions intuitively out of a kind of meditation and bequeathed to us the freedom of yoga.

With our Hatha yoga we automatically maintain good health to the physical frame, bringing it into alignment and performing a gentle stimulation and massage of the internal organs. With our pranayama we bring balance and harmony to the mind; with our meditation, serenity and security to the soul. Our colour therapies are surely more effective when performed with the breath and asana than external application. And, can there be a better method for prolonging life and vitality than Sirsasana? And, having thus perfected ourselves, healing others becomes a natural ability.

But, that is probably where God has been cleverer than I realised in presenting us with all these temptations and choices. He just wants to make sure that, having tried them all, we well and truly do understand that there is no substitute for self-reliance.

All of which may sound a little arrogant on my part, so I hasten to add that I have no doubt that each of these so-called alternatives that our twenty-first century pundits propound, have their part to play and a service to perform. The trick is, I guess, learning the art of discrimination (viveka) and discovering the path that is right for each of us and, having found it, relishing in the uncertainty of our choice…

Yogachistaha Christine Henley has been a yoga teacher for over thirty years, studying and teaching in many countries – from Bahrain, India, America, Sweden and South Africa. She has also written several books on her travels around the world – particularly to the India she loves – and her amusing and down-to-earth approach to yoga in the twenty-first century.