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Part 1: An Unforgettable Night and Reflections on Practice That evening in Jaipur will remain in my mind forever. At one o’clock in the morning, they started testing the microphones for a program perhaps ten houses away. This fellow began, "Testing, testing, one, two, one, two." He continued for three hours, and it was so loud. He started after midnight, so you can imagine when he finished. I was lying there thinking, firstly, it’s working. And I really felt like going and telling him, "One, two, three." So whenever I hear someone in India testing a mic—which is quite normal—and they say, "Testing, testing, one, two," I just think, "Oh, that night." Śrī-dīpa-nirañjana-savadukkha-vañjana-dīpa-nirañjana-savadukkha-vañjana. Riddhaya Kamalākīyake Kulave. Riddhaya Kamalākīyake Kulajave. Yedave Anāmaka Yedave. Śrī Rīpa Nirañjana Sabarukha Bañjana. Nīpa Nirañjana Sabarkha Nirañjana. Viśvarī Pājyoti Ura Me Jaghe. Viśvarī Pājyoti Ura Me Jaghe. Abhaya pārya pāve katha vāgaṅga nirāñjāna, sva-duḥkha-vāñjana prabhu-dhīpā nirāñjāna sva-vāñjana. Śrī Dīpa Nirañjana Sapa Nirañjana Sapa Jana Gujārgata Panāhi Lage Graha Gujārgata Panāhi Lage. Bhūtā pṛtā kāpa-gītā pāpa-gītā pāpa-gītā... Pāpa-gītā Nema Sedyave Tudharshanapave, Nema Sedyave Tudharshanapave, Devī Ratā Devī Sampavañjan, Śrī Dīpa Nirañjan, Sampārukha Vañjan, Prabhudīpa Nirañjan, Sampārukha Vañjan, Śrī Dīpa Dayālānda Ujjala, Śrī Dīpa Dayālānda Ujjala,... Shrī Dīpā, Shrī Dīpā,... Shrī Dīpā,... Shrī Dīpā. Madhava Nanjikeya Nandavaya Pari Summa Parapaya Sumara Summa Sabadukkha Banjan Prabhudipani Ranjana Sabadukkha Banjana. I just want to speak about a few small points. In the last days, several people have asked me how to be able to sit better. When you’re living in India, it starts to become quite natural—meaning, how to sit more comfortably on the floor. From my experience, I don’t think that by doing certain āsanas you can really get to that position of being in comfort while sitting. Doing āsanas cannot change so much how you can sit. But if you seriously want to be able to sit better, then it requires some small, small changes of lifestyle. You have to make that type of sitting part of your daily routine life. In Jadan, I made it so that in the office where I am, there are no chairs; we sit on the floor. Obviously, you can’t do that in your office, or you’ll probably get fired. But there are things you can do in your life. If you think about it, if you’re watching television, for instance, rather than sitting on the sofa, sit on the floor. Perhaps if you can think of a way in your house that when you’re eating, you actually eat on the floor. Or when you’re checking your mail, if you have a laptop, then it’s not so difficult to arrange a system that you can be sitting on the floor while you’re doing it. It’s those types of things that really change how you sit. Because when you’re sitting and you concentrate on something else, you don’t notice that your legs relax, you relax that part of your body. If you re-establish that habit—when we were children, it was no problem to sit on the floor. But slowly, slowly, the more we sit in chairs and sit in postures like this and so on, it gets more tight, more difficult. If you want to make that sitting posture comfortable, so that in the anuṣṭhāna it would be so much easier, then it has to be a part of every day to practice that. And they’re not things that take time, because you’re anyhow going to eat, and you’re anyhow going to check the mail, and you’re anyhow going to do those other things. It’s another form of multitasking. You’re just getting one more thing done at the same time. It can be when you’re talking with your children or when you’re playing that you make sure you sit on the floor rather than sit in a chair. There are so many ways you can think about in your daily life where you could fit that in. You know, here, for instance, we’re doing a lot of sitting anyway, but when you go in the park, sit on the grass rather than on the bench. And with time, it just becomes more and more natural; it becomes your natural posture. The second point: there’s always the same questions coming in the box. The one that’s coming the most often is, how did I come to yoga? I don’t know, by accident, but let me try to say something. When I was young, I would say in high school, actually, for me, the first awareness of being spiritual came through English poetry. I don’t know if any of you have ever read the English Romantic poets, like Keats and Wordsworth, and so on. They are poets who were writing about nature and about seeing God in nature, and that oneness between God and nature and us. And that was something that opened something in me. In Sydney, where my parents’ house is located, both houses are near a national park. It is the second oldest national park in the world. The first national park ever made was in Yellowstone, in America, and this was the second one. So it’s in very good condition, and it’s very natural. And I would just walk out the back of our yard and go down, and there were waterfalls and rivers. So this poetry, together with that lifestyle, was completely perfect for me. I ended up—I mean, it’s one thing to sit on the floor and check the email—but I would actually do everything in the National Park. After school, I’d take my bag with my homework, and I would go and sit by the waterfall and do my homework there, and I’d study there and so on. And then from there, I started to read more about spirituality—things to do with yoga, also things to do with Buddhism, and about meditation. And I don’t know, sort of naturally, I started to meditate by that waterfall, which will always be a very special place to me. And I don’t know if it was more of a concentration, but I used to try and go into the waterfall, into the sounds of the waterfall, and actually, to hear the next level of sound within, like what were the small sounds that were making up that big sound. And doing that, I got quite lost. I mean, lost inside, it was beautiful. There were sounds, and then there were smaller sounds, and then there were the parts of the waterfall, and then there were the actual drops within those parts. And I would spend as long there as I could, until it was too uncomfortable to sit, which wasn’t very long at that stage. And so from there I went traveling around the world and spent some six months in Europe and quite some time in Asia also, especially in Malaysia. And slowly I became more curious about different paths. Going back to Sydney, I did my first yoga class, which was actually from Yoga in Daily Life when they were running courses in a center in Cronulla, which is near to my home. It was quite strange because my friends from school and I decided to all go together, and we dragged along my mother as well, and somebody else’s mother. I think there were about 25 people in the course, and 15 of them were my friends. And Cronulla is very near to the beach, so immediately after class we were all down at the beach, and before also. It was swim, yoga class, swim. In that course, at the end of the course, Hariharanandajī came for two nights to give a meditation class, and that was very special. So after experiencing that, I thought, "Well, he’s very special. I’d love to meet his master." And from there, slowly, I became involved in the ashram. It was maybe six months before Swāmījī was coming at that stage. I was going to Annandale, which is quite far from where I live. Sydney is a huge city, so basically everything is one hour away, at least. From my family’s house to the center of the city is about 25 kilometers, and Annandale is right in the center. So I used to go there by train, and then do the thing which entertained the newspapers very much when I became a Mahāmaṇḍaleśvar, which was ride to the ashram on my skateboard. But I found that actually perfect because the skateboard was a perfect meditation stool. Once I got there, I’d sit on it as a meditation stool. Skateboards make excellent meditation stools because they go on an angle, what you like. Interestingly, I moved into a place more in the city at that stage with one friend. And I was going to the ashram, and one day I was talking with Hariharanandajī about where I was living. He’d also lived in that area before. And he was saying, "Oh yeah, if you go from there to the beach, and you walk up the top of the hill, there’s this place where you can go down and there’s a cave. And if you sit there in the morning, nobody can see you, and you can see the sun rising over the ocean. It’s the most perfect place to meditate." As he started telling me, I was thinking, yeah, yeah... yeah. Because that’s exactly the place that I was riding at five o’clock in the morning to go for a meditation on my skateboard. It’s one very small cave, and really, you can’t see the world behind you. Nobody would know you were there. And you’re on a cliff on top of the ocean, just looking straight out towards the sun. After Swāmījī came to Sydney, and he had his tour that year, I decided that later in the year I would go to India for a few months. But first, I came here to Strelky and to Vaibh. This was in 1996. And then I went to India for a few months, and that’s it. No story. I’m still there. I think the first month is done. It took 15 years. So that’s my story of how I came. As soon as I was in the ashram in Annandale, it already felt like just the right place to be. That was actually the time when they had purchased the ashram in Sydney, and it was the most amazing energy of chaos as they tried to transform an old warehouse into an ashram before Swāmījī arrived a few months later. There were about twenty people living inside. The walls were just made from curtains. I think there was one bathroom. And it was just any time people were doing karma yoga. It was a great time to be there. So that’s that question done. The next question that’s constantly coming in the box is, how to deal with anger? And Gañjīt Ānandjī is going to say something on that as well. I have to say, I consider that people are experts on certain subjects according to their nature. And this is not actually my expertise, because I’m not by nature such an angry person. So I don’t have that experience that some other people have of how to deal with that. You know, we may think, when all of us have our issues and our things which are difficult for us. Mine’s perhaps the opposite. I have a problem telling people something that they would not like to hear. Some people have a problem with not telling them. But according to that, really, your experience is there. The same way, the best doctor is somebody who had that illness which is to be treated, because they know the theory, but they also know in practice how they dealt with it themselves. But from a few points from my side, probably the greatest lesson about anger I ever saw was from my father. He was a school principal. I guess as a school principal, you have to practice being angry sometimes, or acting angry. And we were in Udaipur. My father came to India to visit, to check what on earth his boy was doing over there. And we went for a tour to Udaipur. The taxi driver was interesting. This was one of the great Indian taxi drivers. When we passed through Pali, he tried to convince us that it would be really good if we took all of his family with us, including the children, so that they could also see Udaipur. He wanted to take his children with him, and he wanted to take five children and his wife. And we were going in an Ambassador, in a small car. Anyhow, we got to Udaipur without the family. And he was just constantly doing stupid things, or deliberately doing things to annoy us. And my father was quite calm for some time, and then eventually he had enough. But we were talking about something, about the view or something, what was going on outside, and then suddenly he just went... Absolutely exploded on this taxi driver. It was great. It was just what the taxi driver could relate to. But it went on for about 10 or 15 seconds, that he was really angry with this taxi driver. And then he was finished, and he just turned to me and he said, "Isn’t that so beautiful? Look at that." Like nothing had happened. I thought, that’s practice. You know, he practiced that because he was a principal, and he had to deal with children for so many years. And for him, the use of his voice and expressing something strongly was a tool. Because I think we know that in certain situations, anger is just a natural reaction that comes out. The problem is not with getting angry, but it’s with holding on to it afterwards. You know, if something happened in the afternoon and you’re still angry in the evening when you’re doing something completely different, that’s an issue. And he was so beautifully showing me that because he did what was necessary. The taxi driver was perfect after that. But it did not disturb his day at all. I think when we’re trying to deal with our anger, I don’t know that we can prevent it from coming completely. But why should it affect us afterwards? You know, if something happened on the way here to Strelky and it made you angry, why should that go into the hall when you start to do your meditation? That was already there, it’s gone, it’s past. And if it’s an issue that’s not yet resolved, it will also be waiting afterwards. But the level to which it will affect us and disturb us, that is actually up to us, how much we hold on to it. And it’s up to us how we put it together, and what is the level that we let ourselves be disturbed by. There’s that example I told last week, but for those who weren’t here, of the great episode at the gate in Jadan ashram last month. The guard came to me in the morning, very excited about what had happened on the night shift. He said, "I have to tell you what happened. I have to tell you." He had stayed very late, so I knew it must have been something good. He stayed very late; he should leave at 7 o’clock in the morning, it was already 9 o’clock, and he was waiting to tell me this story. And he said, "Last night there was this man at the gate, completely drunk." And he was falling in the gate and saying, "Let me out, let me out! Open the lock, let me go home. I want to go to the village." And our guard, Guoman Singhjī, said, and I told him, "I’m standing inside, and you’re outside the gate. The village is behind you." And this fellow, this poor fellow was screaming at the gate, "Man, you’re lying, you’re lying! Open the lock, let me out!" And he said it took ten minutes to convince the fellow to turn around so that he could see that the village was behind him and he wasn’t locked in. It took ten minutes for him to understand. It’s not there. Part 2: The Light of Understanding and Compassion Some things are not so easy to manage, but most of the things that make us angry or irritate us, we can simply turn around. They do not need to destroy our entire day. Similarly, if we can improve our communication to express what we feel to others without it disturbing us, that is perhaps a skill that is completely under-practiced. It seems the whole world has a deficiency in being able to say things without having to speak from anger or upset. I think the whole world has a problem with communicating in a way that people do not get offended and do not feel uncomfortable. For example, to tell someone in peace, "Look, I do not like what you are doing here," is perhaps hard because they may not change because of that. But it can be very surprising when you express that to somebody, and they say, "Oh, really? I didn’t realize that," and then it truly makes a difference. Whereas the natural reaction when someone is angry towards you is, anyhow, to put up your barrier, make protection, and try to stop what they are saying from coming to you. The questions that are coming are perhaps all to do with the same thing: anger. And then we will talk about forgiveness, and then about understanding. Two words are there: understanding and compassion. If you make understanding into two parts, you have under and standing. If you want to understand somebody, you have to stand underneath them. You have to actually be able to sit, as it says in our yoga philosophy, that you sit below the teacher so that the knowledge can come towards you. But to understand another person or to understand a child, you actually have to sit in relation to them so that their opinion and their knowledge can come down to you. I do not know how it is in your mind, but in my mind, I so often find myself listening to someone but not actually listening to them, because already my opinion of what they should think is going on in my mind. It is not an understanding; it is an overstanding. First, one has to listen, to take that in, and to accept from their perspective what is the reality. That is the only chance that you can understand that person. And after understanding, then you can form an opinion about it. And then, if things were perfect, they will also understand you. It is a constant flow of receiving and receiving, of receiving knowledge and giving knowledge, and receiving and giving. But for that relationship to work, you have to be prepared for both: both to receive and to give. The other word is compassion, so commonly used in our yoga practice. A common passion comes from two words: common passion. We are not talking about passion here as in desire toward someone, but in general passion. What is that other person feeling? What is strong inside them? It is a very beautiful word because it means you actually become one with that person. You feel what is going on inside them. You try and become one with how it must be for them. It is not something where feeling sorry for somebody is somehow arrogant, that I am in a better position than you, so I feel sorry for you that you have it so bad. But compassion is when you actually feel that pain, or feel that happiness, or feel that frustration that is in that other person. You become one with it. And that is the way that you can support someone; that is the way you really can give compassion. Perhaps you could even say it is not a giving when you give compassion, but it is a sharing, because you are just sharing their burden or sharing their situation—not in a way that I can help them, but in a way that we are together in this. There is a beautiful story from the Jewish tradition that I was also telling, maybe in the first week here in Stryuchy. There was one rabbi and his students, and they had some prayer, some pūjā, which they should do at the first light in the morning. And the students were asking him, "When is that point? When is the first light?" It is a very good question. When is that point of first light? So the students were asking one by one. One student said, "Is it the time when there is enough light that in the distance I can see whether it is a sheep or a dog?" And he was saying, "No, no, that is not it." The second one was asking, "Is it the time when there is enough light that I can see which color the leaves on the tree are?" No. "Is it the time when I can see in the distance if it is a man or a woman who is walking?" Again, no. "Is it the time when there is enough light that when you hold your hand in front, you can see the lines on your palm?" And again he said, "No." So, of course, they were giving up, and they said, "Well, when is it?" And he said, "It is the time when you can see everybody as your brother and your sister. It is the time when you see everyone around you as your brothers and sisters, and that is the right time to do pūjā." And that is it. That is compassion, that is understanding. And that is yoga. What a perfect love it is when you see everybody as your brother and sister. And when that is our practice, to develop those qualities within ourselves, then obviously that is the aim: to see like that. So compassion and understanding—that is one thing to be having with somebody else. The question about forgiveness was also just as much asking about how to forgive myself, because that is such an important part of our yoga practice. Before I go to that, one experience of mine from Jadam about understanding: something that constantly makes me feel incredibly humble is when there may be people who are in the ashram, and they have been coming for many years, especially some who are coming with the group. And once they have found this person, they are so difficult to deal with. This has happened to me a few times. And I have thought, "Why don’t they practice more yoga? They should be more calm, more respecting, or more peaceful." But at one stage, just somehow, I come to be talking with that person and discover something about their past, their childhood, and their experiences in life. When I come to see those things and realize how much they have done to come to the point they are now, compared to myself, who had such a childhood with such good parents—parents that made it so easy for me to do what I wanted—and this spiritual environment at home, and to see the progress that that person has made, I think I should perhaps do a little bit more work. Because this journey is actually not about the point that you are at, but the amount of improvement that you are making. If you started off in a peaceful atmosphere and you are just 20 years later in that same peaceful atmosphere, you have not gone very far. But somebody who has come from a place of disturbance and has come to a certain level of peace, that is a major achievement. It is the same experience for me at school with the children. The local public is obsessed with the fact that you should have the best students in the district: the top students, the top marks. The local parents want you to have the top marks, the students with the top marks. But if you bring the students with the top marks to your school, and then they get the top marks, what have you done? For me, rather than have a student who used to get 85% and now gets 86%, a better achievement is to take a student from 20% to 60%. That is teaching, that is good practice. And on our spiritual path, one of the great dangers when you are living in a community, like in an āśram as in Jadana or here in Strylky, is to compare yourself to other people. Because everybody is on a different journey. Everybody has different issues. And everybody also has different things hidden in their box that have not yet been presented to them by Swamijī. Somebody may be in complete bliss and ānanda and peace this week, and next week Swāmījī will take out one new thing for them to work on. We are here to support each other, to relate to each other, to understand each other. But by comparing yourself to somebody else and thinking, "He is doing better than she is," or, "She is doing better than he is," that is absolutely useless activity. The only question is whether we are moving forward on our spiritual path. From day to day, if you look in Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras, in one stage it says quite specifically that there is no such thing as right and wrong in yoga. But there are things which are good for your spiritual path, like progress on your spiritual journey, and there are things that take you backward. And it is just, as we practice, it is just our goal, our aim, to continuously move forward, to continuously move towards that which we aim to achieve. So when you are looking at yourself, it is so easy to judge yourself and say, "Ah, again I did that wrong," and get angry with oneself. But it is again holding on to the gate, like the drunken man. If you did something wrong, if you did something that moved you backwards on your path, it happened. It is done. But the question is about the next step that you will take. The next moment, whether again you will start to move forward, or whether you will become so obsessed with that point that it will keep you going backwards, and you will go with it. That is where, for me, the importance of forgiveness towards yourself in your practice is so important. It does not mean that you let yourself do anything. You try to change that behavior, you try to improve the behavior, you try to get better habits. But when you fail, it is not a time to become angry with yourself or down on yourself. It is a time to again try. You crash many, many times. I remember Avatārpuri learning to ride the bike. I have never seen somebody crash so many times. I did not see Gajanandjī, no. At that time, when Avatārpuri wanted to learn to ride the bike, Samādhi was taking care of him, and we had to get her to go away so that she did not see. Because she was constantly trying to catch him and stop him from falling over, he was not learning anything that way. He fell over a few times this way and that way, and so on and so forth, and there was some blood on his knees. But he learned to ride the bike, and he did not really injure himself doing it. It is the same; everything we are doing, every practice we are trying to perfect. We fall off this way, we fall off that way, we fall off again and again. But once we get through that practice, once we actually master that particular part of the practice, you cannot actually manage not to do it anymore. Sit on a bike and try not to ride it. Once you know how, try to sit on it and constantly fall off. I do not think you will manage. You will always put a foot out or something and keep yourself up or stop yourself from falling. And once you have learned it, you never forget it again. Yes, there are so many things we have to master, so many small things we have to practice, so many issues within ourselves. But through that patience and with forgiveness, we must master them one by one. And when one small thing is mastered, that is one that we do not need to worry about because it is already ready, it is running. And we move on to the next part of our practice. There is one beautiful little thing. Last night Niranjan Purī was saying that he sends all the problems to me in the ashram. Most of you will know Father David from Australia. He was here, I think, in Bratislava at the World Peace Conference and at quite a few other World Peace Conferences. And he has a huge job. Besides running the church in his state, he also works in the government on a lot of commissions to help people who are mentally unstable or to include them in society, and many, many things. The scale of what he does is, for my mind, just incredible. It is so many things that he does. And I said to him, "How do you deal with all those problems every day?" And he said, "Oh no, I do not have any problems." And he said, "I do not call them problems, I call them issues." Because an issue is something that you deal with, that you just fix, that you work out how to find a solution to it. And a problem is something that gives you a headache. So whatever comes, it is not a problem, it is just another issue. It is a beautiful way to think, you know, on your spiritual path also. These are not problems which we have with ourselves. These are issues waiting for a solution. And through our practice and through Swāmījī’s blessing and through the sādhanā which he gives us, we will find the solution to that issue. If it is a problem, it is something that intimidates you somehow; it is something that even develops fear. But in English, an issue is a different thing. It has far less fire inside it. Same thing, different word, different attitude. So I better stop. Sorry, Gajanandjī. Yeah, it is now already twelve. I will just say one or two minutes more. So please have a think about those things. When we are going on our path, so many times we make mistakes. We all have our issues. Other people have issues which we do not have. We have issues which other people do not have. We are here to go forward. We are here to try and change. But let us do that with also a respect towards ourselves. Respect the fact that we are capable of that change. And one other very important point is to respect everybody else’s right to change. And try to remain open to that person as they are before you. Because if somebody is really working on their issues and they have changed, and you are still thinking about the same physical body as it was ten years ago, the person that was inside there, then it may be that you are seeing issues and things inside that person which are not there anymore. I think we all want that other people will respect and understand and see the changes, the transformation that happens inside us. But it is also very important as a community to remain open to see that in other people. I am sure that in everyone’s yoga community, you can relate to one, if I can paint one scene. Somebody, one picture, I will make one picture. Somebody comes who has been living in the ashram for 10 or 15 years. And 10 years ago, they were doing this and this and this. And they come to you and they say, "You should not do that." And immediately comes in your mind, yeah, but they did it, they have been doing it all the time. I can remember in 2001 when he did it, and then in 2003 he was also doing it, and in 2005. Our mind just goes, but if he could do it, then why should not I do it? But maybe at that time he was stupid, and now he got some intelligence and worked out that it is not good to do. At that time it was a mistake, and now he has realized the mistake, and he is giving that advice from experience. Now, if we do not live as a community in the present and respect the changes which are within each person, and respect the experience which each person has had on their path, and listen to the voice of that experience which they are giving now, then we risk not being able to hear the treasures which people have. So remain with eyes, ears, and hearts open. And so, keep your eyes, ears, and heart open.