YOGALife I Summer 2010 - Sivananda Yoga

misunderstood when brought down to the mundane.
On the causal plain, these things manifest. It’s not that
we cause illness or disease. It’s already there on the
causal plain, and it filters down to the physical body.
So, it’s not that I’m doing something bad for my knee
if it hurts. Instead, there’s some reason on the causal
plain that it filtered down, that this particular knee
would be affected in that way.
Again, we try to simplify everything in the west.
We say, “Oh, you caused your pain. If you just changed
your attitude, the pain would go away.”
Julie: It also becomes egocentric when we say, “I caused
this and I can heal it.”
Nischala: That’s right. There’s the mistaken identity that
the ego is in charge instead of the divine self. The divine
self has certain lessons that it needs to learn and part of
it is through the body.
Julie: Beautiful. Whatever we’re handed is a gift from
the divine, to help us learn.
“We treated the whole person, and their
hearts got better"
Nischala: A line from a Rumi poem that expresses this
is: “I needed more grace than I thought.” To me, this
means that the grace brings us to knowing whether we
can change the physical, change our attitude toward the
physical or accept it all.
What yoga tells us is that there’s really only one cause
for disease, which is that we have forgotten who we are.
And all of this is just to remind us of that. Swami
Satchidananda used to say, “the hospitals are the
ashrams of today.” He said you can’t get people to go
into an ashram, so they go into a hospital instead where
they’re made to sit with themselves, to really look inside
and see what their life is about.
Julie: Although, a lot of people in hospitals are on
so many drugs that it’s impossible to have any kind
of introspection or real external communication.
Nischala: A lot of people are still coherent enough.
And they look at their life. “What happens if I don’t get
out of here?” “What’s important to me?”
Julie: Why did you call your new book The Secret Power
of Yoga?
Nischala: I really believe that within Patanjali’s Yoga
Sutras, it’s all there. I wanted people to understand the
yoga sutras in a simple way that relates to us now, yet
keeps the essence of it intact. That’s the secret power
of yoga, how it can relate to us right now.
Yoga of the Heart
Julie: But you tackled this for another reason, too, and
that is to have a feminine perspective of the yoga sutras.
Nischala: Absolutely. The ways the text has been
translated bothered me for a long time. You see, the yoga
sutras have three books, and the third book talks about
psychic powers and spiritual powers, and what’s ironic
to me is that many women already have those powers.
Julie: You use words like miraculous and intuition, and
you also foray into left and right brain hemisphere roles
and differences.
Nischala: And the polarization between the heart and
the head.
I got to know Patanjali well during this and we had
a very intimate relationship. There’s a story in the back
of the book where I tell about a direct transmission from
him in India.
I learned Patanjali was a reformer. He realized that
the times were changing – it was shifting into Kali Yuga,
which is the Iron Age – and that people were not going
to read the Vedas. People were not going to read the
Upanishads. So what he did was say, “I’m going to make
this simple for people so we can keep it, and I’m going
to talk to them in a simple way, and I’m going to distill
the Upanishads, the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita into
195 aphorisms.” He was a reformer who was talking
to the people of his day.
Now we’re coming to the other side of Kali Yuga and
the repression of women that took place during that
period is disappearing and women are taking the
spotlight again. I felt that this is the next reformation
and the next reforming of the yoga sutras for a particular
group of people that are now emerging and practicing
was needed.
Julie: I suppose also that cultural events shaped many
translations during this time.
Nischala: Yet the truth is truth. The British ruled India
for over 200 years and during that time the sacred
teachings were never translated, they were always kept
in the ancient languages. When the British came in, they
then began translating some of these scriptures into
English. It’s like taking a peach and trying to make apple
pie out of it. They were translated into a pragmatic
language like English, and affected by what was
happening during the Protestant reformation and
a puritanical movement in Europe and England during
the 1800’s. A puritanical mindset was brought in when
the Sutras, the Gita and the Vedas were translated.
Julie: These were attempts at understanding, though,
were they not?
Nischala: Yes, but they didn’t understand it, because
of their mindset. What happened is for instance, what
I consider these incredible teachings of the yama and
niyama reduced to the Ten Commandments. Yama and
niyama doesn’t tell us what thou shalt not do. What it
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