Journey With Yoga estimated publication date: Jun 2026

While living in New Zealand, I learned a lot from my late teacher Swami Shantimurti Saraswati (Swami means celibate monk). His preparation as lecturer never ended. It started with 12 years stay at the Bihar School of Yoga. It continued with yearly visits to the Himalayas and knowledge sharing with Sadhus; monks. Shanti met Iyengar; the Dalai Lama and many others. He worked a lot teaching Guru Rimpoche, which is at the interface of Buddhism and his Vedic Yoga.

2022 photo of Lama Zeupa and myself on his Tibetan Yoga lesson covering some inverted postures (krias); pranayamas; etc.

Why? He is like a doctor treating a patient. There is no point talking about healthy states (harmony with your mind and union) to someone who is sick. The person has to realize the illness and the cause first. “You are shot by an arrow? Remove the arrow”.

What is desire? What is aversion? I sometimes feel there is a force or voice within me that is trying to grasp; pull things I desire towards me. When I feel that; I know I am desiring. Likewise; I sometimes feel I try to push things I fear; dislike away from me. That is aversion. I feel I am moving. I am not in peace. The same for things I am attracted-to or disgusted-by; love or hate. I feel it in my body, often in my arms.

It took a deep breath in and opened its tentacles. The current was strong and indeed it banged against a rock. A bit stunned it started learning to swim in the current and upwards, it finally saw some light.

Generalisation allows applying the solution to one problem widely to all other similar problems.

To me, finding yoga was like finding the lost manual for the instrument I received from my parents (body, mind, the whole package of a human form). You know when you buy a movie camera and it comes with a manual on how to: clean it; recharge it; change the tape; start filming; do slow motion; freeze the image; fast forward? Every camera and computer I bought had a manual. I love reading manuals and extracting every functionality I have from my devices.

I usually would think: ‘where is the mind manual?’ Regarding the mind manual: some sages – thousands of years ago – started writing the manual on mind, right? Yes. Sure. We have been quoting from those manuals here all the time. Please use them. Reading them again and again will transform your mind.

To me, finding yoga was like finding the lost manual for the instrument I received from my parents (body, mind, the whole package of a human form). You know when you buy a movie camera and it comes with a manual on how to: clean it; recharge it; change the tape; start filming; do slow motion; freeze the image; fast forward? Every camera and computer I bought had a manual. I love reading manuals and extracting every functionality I have from my devices.

I told her: “what you did was truly amazing; what good friends your mind and body were to make that ball pass one inch away from the hole from such a long distance.”

“Why do you talk to yourself cursing (aggressively) when you did pretty good? It could be that the grass that is to blame. How will your mind get its good actions reinforced and learn further when you curse it for such an amazing shot?”

You know those tennis players that break the racket by banging it angrily on the ground after missing a point? That is not a-himsa (non-violence). Well, these are not yogis, these are tennis players (smile).

Nothing could move that mountain of a man.

Thus a comment on usefulness. It also declared his true motivation to be like the sun and the rain for others. Not like a pretty and useless rainbow.

One such techniques was meditation on death. You can find some mentions and descriptions of it on the Dhammapada; on Paulo Coelho’s “the pilgrimage”; on Ananda Marga’s practices such as visiting a cemetery at night (cemetery sadhana, which is also about confronting fear in general, not only of death). Christ was also meditating on it: “He who has known the world has found a corpse; and he who has found a corpse, the world is not worthy of him.” – Christ on Gospel of Thomas Saying 56.

The real strength comes from the freedom of being able to have and then choosing not to have. Just locking yourself from having is maybe not a test of the mind strength. But well resolute.

I did not mean to criticize dogs by their silly tail chasing. It is just to explain us human going silly. Dogs are wonderful creatures and I absolutely adore them. I go to the park and I see the dogs often have more peace, kindness, energy, and forgiveness than their human owners.

Ordinary man are weird creatures. Dogs are wonderful. Diogenes van Sinope would stay with me on this.

This above quote has several interpretations. From looking at your shadow producing negative thoughts, to just discovering the causes of life processes. But let us approach the phrase from a materialistic angle. Society chasing money... not knowing where money comes from.

Much better is the ability to make money than the money itself. For if one happens to lose the money he has; and he has never improved his ability to make money; then it will not be easy to earn the lost money back quickly.

“If money is your hope for independence, you will never have it. The only real security that a man can have is a reserve of knowledge, experience and ability.” – Henry Ford.

The peace metaphor that helps us here is that of a placid lake with no waves on the surface. The lake eventually comes to rest and is in peace. One can say that this mirror surface of the lake is the natural state of the lake in the absence of wind, perturbations, desires, fear, attachments. More important, on such a lake one can see the bottom. And a tiny drop of a thought is so intensely noticeable. In such peace, even if for a few days on a retreat, mindfulness develops further.

Finding this peace is a process that goes more about removing than adding… Coming to a rest. My teacher Lama Zeupa says: “it is like an onion you remove layer upon layer, until you find nothing” and that is a beautiful finding of a nothing!

A metaphor typically used for the work on layer upon layer of our self.

Left boarder: relaxed, not afraid to fall. Flowing down the mountain in long ‘S’ shaped waves, garlands where he goes as if he would fall back, and then inverts and goes as if he would fall to the front. In doing so, it is much less likely he has an actual fall. If he stays too much on one of the curves of the ‘S’ shape, he goes in circles or falls, so he alternates concave, convex with his body; arch back; arch forward. By alternating he does not get tired, the muscles are either contracting or relaxing by changing the arch. He can snowboard the whole day like this and not get tired. Even when aiming at going straight, he just does a long, stretched ‘S’ with bits of arching back or forward. It looks like he is falling back, and his centre of gravity may even be a bit outside the centre of the board, but he is not going to fall easily here. He relies on carving the snow with the side, edge of the board. The board feels reliable like a knife in the snow, cutting through eventual small bumps.

What has the Judoca lost by fearing losing? His mind? His peace? His right view? You should wonder why I am bringing this subject of “fearing losing” here when we were talking about desiring things...

Dissociation is when ‘what we think’ is other than ‘what we say’, which is other than ‘what we do’, ‘achieve’. For instance, I may have the intention of doing something good, but then I say it all wrong and do it even different than what I said.