For centuries, yoga adepts and spiritual seekers have been heading to Rishikesh, a small city in northern India, hoping to find ancient wisdom in its purest form. Przekrój editor and yogi Agnieszka Rostkowska followed in their footsteps to talk with Sandeep Pandey, one of the most renowned yoga teachers in the Himalayan Yoga tradition.
Would it even be possible to count all those ashrams and schools of yoga?—I ask myself maneuvering between holy cows and rikshaws on the narrow streets of Yog Nagari, the “city of yoga,” as Rishikesh is often called in Sanskrit. The walls of the houses, cafes, and hotels are sealed with tens of posters advertising everything the modern yogi may need: daily drop-in classes, short- and long-term courses, themed workshops, special retreats, and yoga teacher trainings, as well as all kinds of meditations, mantra chanting, singing bowls and gong concerts, ayurvedic massages—this list seems to be endless. However, I did not come to Rishikesh to benefit from all that, but mostly to talk with Sandeep Pandey, an expert in Himalayan Yoga, which is the classical, meditative form of yoga.
Agnieszka Rostkowska: We meet each other in the lap of Himalayas, in Rishikesh—a city often referred to as “the world capital of yoga.” How did it gain such prominence?
Sandeep Pandey: Rishikesh is the gateway to the Himalayas, where yogis, sadhus—those who left their home to live simple ascetic life—and saints have been dedicating themselves to spiritual practices for centuries. Some of them still live in the caves high in the mountains. Before going into the extreme temperatures of the Himalayas, many were first staying for some time in Rishikesh, a town with a milder climate, to prepare their bodies and minds for the harsh conditions awaiting them.
People eager to grow spirituality followed their path. Among them was Sivananda Saraswati, a young doctor serving in British Malaya who decided to take sannyasa—an ancient practice of detachment. He abandoned his family and his medical profession to start studies on Sanskrit and Vedanta philosophy, meaning the essence of Vedas, the sacred Hindu scriptures, in Kailas Ashram Brahmavidya Peeth. It is one of the oldest ashrams in Rishikesh with such famous alumni as Swami Satyanada Saraswati who, later on in 1963, opened the first university of yoga in India, known as the Bihar School of Yoga.
Swami Sivananda also became one of the most renowned yoga gurus. He wrote over two hundred books on yoga and established his own ashram, Divine Life Society, which quickly grew and gained popularity. More and more disciplines were heading to study in Rishikesh.
At the same time, the city was a home to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of so-called Transcendental Meditation, which is based on a silent repetition of sounds or mantras. In 1958, he started a global tour, teaching this meditation technique to thousands of people worldwide. His fame grew when the Beatles came to Rishikesh to meditate under his guidance and spent more than a year in his ashram. Other celebrities and their fans followed. That is how Rishikesh gained the name Yog Nagari, the city of yoga.
Later on, Swami Rama—who is considered a founder of Himalayan Yoga tradition—organised a huge yoga event in 1993 that, after years, turned into an annual festival, now known as International Yoga Festival. Every March people from all over the world come to Rishikesh to learn and practice yoga.
For many years you were one of the yoga teachers of this festival, demonstrating the most challenging asanas, or yoga positions, to the public.
I was born into a Brahmin family and at the age of eight I was sent to Gurukul, which is a traditional school where students get educated by their gurus in Sanskrit and different disciplines of knowledge. After graduating I spent nineteen years living in the ashrams learning yoga, Sanskrit, Vedas, and philosophy. When the International Yoga Festival was established, I already had more than fourteen years of teaching experience. I was physically very fit and flexible so at the festival I was on stage performing the most advanced sets of asanas. At that time, I thought that was what it meant to be a yogi! Only later I understood what yoga is. When I realized its true meaning, I threw all my certificates and diplomas that I have been gaining throughout my whole life to the Ganga River.
Really? What did you realise?
That being a yoga teacher isn’t equal to being an asana teacher. They are two different things.
The term yoga derives from the Sanskrit root word yuj which means “to unite.” That is a very broad meaning. We both came to Rishikesh—you came all the way from Poland, I came from India—to meet each other; that is yoga, too. In Hindi and in Sanskrit when two or more things or persons come together, we call it yoga, a union.
Traditionally, yoga was perceived as a union of the body, mind, breath, awareness, and consciousness. Since ancient times gurus and swamis have been using the body as a tool—or a vehicle—to achieve this union. The same way we use a bike or a car to go from one place to another, they used number of techniques like asanas and pranayamas to train the body to sit comfortably in meditation and go from lower to higher states of consciousness. They meditated on the question: “Who am I?” And they kept on asking themselves: “Am I this body?” “No.” “Am I emotions?” “No.” “Am I mind?” “No.” “Then who am I?” And the answer was: “I am the Consciousness, the Soul, the Divine.” That is why in the Himalayan Yoga tradition, we say “yogaḥ samādhih,” yoga is samadhi, the state of complete balance that no words can convey.
Is it considered more likely for a person to attain samadhi in the Himalayas?
The Himalayas have always been the source of inspiration and reflection on this existence where many great yogis and philosophers practiced meditation and realised one’s own nature. Yoga itself might have originated from the Himalayas.
The Himalayas are also the birthplace of Ganga, the original Hindi name for the Ganges River, which, according to Hinduism, is the holiest of all the rivers. In our Puranas, which is our mythology, it is written that Ganga came from heaven and fell onto the god Shiva’s head. Otherwise, the earth would have broken under the impact of her unrestrained flow.
Hindu saints and masters have always said: “If you want to grow in knowledge, especially knowledge about yourself, about who you are—stay near Ganga”. She is the goddess of knowledge and in Sanskrit has one thousand names and epithets that we often recite to show our respect to her. One of them is Bramharandhra, so a term used for sahasrara, the crown chakra which is responsible for higher consciousness. It is believed that meditation close to Ganga leads you towards the knowledge that is true, eternal—nitya, and that which is just not true, not eternal—anitya. And Rishikesh is situated along the banks of Ganga, only about 250 kilometers from its source. No wonder it has been a pilgrimage center for centuries. And still it is, but nowadays it is also promoted for tourism and commercialized. People do rafting on Ganga and on its banks emerged hotels, some of which flush sewers into the river. It is such a disrespect . . . Ganga is a place to take a ritual dip for both internal and external purification. This river may help you realize that for your whole life, you were holding onto false ideas, e.g a notion that you are the body. You are more than this body, you are consciousness. This understanding can only happen through meditation, though.
We associate knowledge with learning, but seems rather like it is unlearning, especially unlearning who we are.
Knowledge does not come from the outside sources like books, but from within, from the inside. It is the information that comes from outside. The Western education system is based on the outside. Yoga is based on the inside.
As my master Swami Veda Bharati used to say: yoga is about inner net, not internet. The moment you connect with the inner net you are connected to the whole universe. Yogis believe that whatever exist outside is just a reflection of what is inside. They call the body pinda-brahmanda: pinda means “body,” bramhanda means “universe.” There is a Sanskrit saying: “Whatever exists in the universe, exists in my body and whatever exists in my body exists in the universe.” That is why yogis turn inwards. While sitting in meditation under a tree or in a cave they experience the whole universe. Thousands of years ago, through inner visions of meditation, they got access to all the knowledge about the human body, like anatomy, that modern science started to learn in the seventeenth century through post-mortem examinations!
This is the highest form of yoga. You won’t learn it during two-, three-, or five-hundred-hour yoga teacher trainings that are so popular in Rishikesh or even during a year of regular practice. In such a period of time you can merely learn how to sit and breathe properly!
So, Himalayan Yoga is the one based on the ancient methods of meditation?
Yes, in Himalayan Yoga our goal is to guide our students into meditation, not to make them the asanas teacher. Of course, we teach asanas, pranayamas, mudras, mantras etc., but this is just dhyana, a training on how to focus the mind, leading to meditation.
The term Himalayan Yoga was introduced by Swami Rama who underlined that it is a traditional, classical teaching of the sages of our parampara, which is the Vedic tradition of transmitting knowledge from a guru to a student. Swami Rama revealed the many facets of this living tradition in his autobiographical, world-bestseller Living With the Himalayan Masters. Being part of parampara, the lineage of masters, is very important in Himalayan Yoga. It is like joining the current of a holy river and allowing the Guru-shakti, the Supreme Energy, to guide you in your spiritual growth.
Do we really need a master? It is said that the real guru is within . . .
I will give you a simple example: suppose you want to learn how to swim. You attend a course or private lessons led by a professional trainer. If you are serious about it, you search for a good coach and hire one. Until you don’t know how to swim you are totally dependent, first on your life jacket, then on your coach, but after the training you don’t need a lifejacket or a coach. A guru is like a spiritual coach, a person who helps you to start your spiritual journey. The term derives from Sanskrit and means Light, because a guru is the very light which dispels the darkness of ignorance about one’s own self.
However, as Swami Rama used to underline, a guru is not a physical being, it is the pure consciousness that lies within you. If I tell you that you just need to connect with your inner guru, would you know right away how to do it? Probably not. That is why first you need some help. Once you embark on this journey and make sure you are on the right path, you can explore it on your own.
So how to find a guru? With sport coaches it is easier, there are rankings in the press and on the internet!
Lot of books offer an answer to that question. For example, The Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda or the ones written by Swami Satyananda who has explained in detail the proper relations between disciple and guru. To give you some hints: a true guru is not business-oriented, doesn’t look for publicity or fame, and won’t put himself in the position of a master.
Why is the Western perception of yoga so distant from the meditative one and is mostly understood as physical practice of asanas, followed by a short relaxation?
I have been teaching foreigners for more than a decade. What I have observed is that most of the Westerners face constant stress. That is why they are so focused on their minds and bodies, not on the consciousness. Living in the permanent tension, they try to take care of themselves, physically and mentally, and asanas and pranayamas—often used as relaxation techniques—help on both levels. You go to a yoga class and after 1.5 hour of practice you feel like “Oh my God, a miracle, all the tension is gone!” And in the night, another “miracle” happens—your insomnia is also gone, you sleep like a child! No, it is not a miracle, but a typical body response to asana practice. And it is fine to treat yoga in the way of just taking care of the body. Not everybody has to meditate.
“Taking care of the body” in Himalayan tradition is also different from the Western approach.
In the West people focus on cosmetic treatments, e.g. body scrubs, massages, and other forms of external purification. In our tradition of yoga, we focus on inner purification, which is called shatkarmas. These are six practices: neti (cleansing the nose and sinus with salty water), dhauti (cleansing the digestive tract by vomiting or swallowing a long sloth and removing it), basti (cleansing the intestine by enema), nauli (rotating belly muscles combined with breathwork aiming to massage the internal organs), kapalabhati (rapid breathing), and trataka (cleansing your eyes by gazing at one point, e.g. a flame of a candle). All of them purify internal systems, especially digestive and respiratory ones, but they also work on a deeper—mental, emotional and spiritual—level. Remember that yoga is an ancient holistic system, according to scriptures like the Vedas, at least five thousand years old.
One of the most important of those scriptures are the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Dated to about two thousand years old, they are comprised of 195 aphorisms on yoga, out of which only two are about asanas.
These are the sutra II.46: Sthira-sukham āsanam, which means that asana should be steady and comfortable and sutra II.47 Prayatna-śaithilya-ananta-samāpattibhyām, which is about the relaxation of continued effort and connection with what is infinite. Both underline that you shouldn’t go beyond your limits and should stay relaxed enough to breathe properly. The breath is the vehicle of prana, the life energy, and it enables you to stay longer in asana and experience ananta: bliss and eternal happiness. If you are not aware of your breath, it is not yoga, but just a physical activity like a gym training.
If you follow the guidance of those two sutras, you will experience results described as Tataḥ dvandvānabhighātaḥ—from that you won’t be troubled by the pair of opposites (sutra II.48). That means you won’t be affected, physically or mentally, by the cold or heat, suffering or pleasure etc.
Not being affected by pleasure doesn’t sound very tempting!
Quite the contrary. For a yogi, happiness is not dependent on outer conditions, benefit or loss, nor is pain. Patanjali in sutra I.12 calls it vairagya, non-attachment: Abhyāsa-vairāgyābhyam tan-nirodhaḥ—the mastering of the mind is attained through the practice and non-attachment. People get attached to vrittis, the thoughts, that their mind constantly produces. However, you can train your mind to reduce the wavering thoughts by abhyasa, which is repeated, constant practice, and vairagya, which is detachment. That means not being dependent on your family, job or belongings, and able to leave all that behind.
I assume you have a strong connection to your country, Poland, your family and friends. However, you were able to leave them, temporarily, to come to India to talk with me. To do so you needed vairagya. Some of our sadhus leave it all behind permanently and detach from the material life for the goal of samadhi. Don’t worry, though! Detachment from the material world is not necessary. What is necessary is to keep your main focus on your practice of yoga. That is why in Indian culture many gurus have a wife and children—me, too.
A yogi doesn’t lead a lonely life, but a life of non-attachment; if one day everything he has is taken away from him, he remains unshaken and unaffected by the loss.
Sandeep Pandey: Himalayan Yoga expert, yoga teacher in Yoga Vidya Mandiram School in Rishikesh, and guest lecturer at the Banaras Hindu University.
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