The Real Nature of Yoga, It's not just a physical exercise

Most of the people around the globe have little to no knowledge of yoga. 'Yoga' means union with the cosmos and it is so much more than twisting your limbs in seemingly different nonsensical postures. Whenever you mention yoga to someone, people in India will generally conjure up the image of Baba Ramdev as its brand ambassador. Just for the fact, Baba Ramdev named his company Patanjali because saint Patanjali wrote the 'Yoga sutras'. What Baba Ramdev teaches is called Raj yoga that is designed to cover the physical aspect of yoga. The biggest disappointment regarding yoga is people reducing it to the level of another physical exercise, the notion of yoga being a practice to keep you fit and healthy is an incomplete and underestimated picture.

There are several forms of yoga and different dimensions to it. Explaining it in a blog is almost impossible and I'm not a master myself to teach you the real technique but I can give you a broad idea of yoga and its different aspect. So yoga has four dimensions, physical, mental, spiritual, and Samadhi. Physical deals with controlling your physical body and organs, mental yoga is to make you mentally strong in terms of memory and intellect, spiritual is to give you out of the world experiences and never felt emotions and samadhi is to give you the absolute bliss. Each of the four mentioned dimensions is explained beautifully in Patanjali's "Yoga Sutra" but I know for a fact that it is extremely tough for young people to understand this kind of literature as it is a bit spiritual in nature.

The few yoga techniques which I know of include Zen meditation that is practiced by Buddhist monks. Zen itself is divided into several other forms. One of the practices of zen meditation is to force yourself to sit in meditation for days by sheer will, it is an extremely difficult task to do. Another is to give up your own identity by completely imbibing a diety's personality, this destroys the ego and the concept of self thus ending one's suffering. I know these are needed to be explained in great detail before you understand them, but the purpose of this blog is to give you just an overview and how it connects with all the psychological experiments that have been conducted on advanced meditators and monks over the period of time. Another technique of zen mediation is 'Vipaasnaa', it is the simplest among all three mentioned and it aims at being mindful of your senses and especially of your breath. 'Vipassana' is generally practiced for 12, 24, or 48 years, and every one of these techniques tends to bring mental peace and yogic powers. Other forms include transcendental meditation that is about visualizing that ultimately generates never before felt experiences and the last one is 'Kriya yoga', generally considered as the highest form of yoga, it deals with imagining nervous systems, energy flow in our bodies and much more. I think 'Kundalini Yoga' (which Shaktiman used to do with all the chakras on his back) is also a part of 'Kriya Yoga', but I'm not sure about this. I won't discuss the powers of kriya yoga as it is way out of the general people's realm, it seems way to magical to be true.

Enough with the description of yoga, now I'll take you to the kind of power yoga can bring that has been scientifically corroborated by many doctors and scientists. Even an amateur Buddhist monk who has practiced meditation for a year or so can survive extreme cold, in one of the experiment few novice monks dried a blanket soaked in ice water within half an hour. These monks can generate heat at will and can also direct it to the specific parts of their body. Brain scans of these monks show that they can generate very complex patterns and imagery for a sustained period of time due to their highly increased visualization powers. One of the swami by the name of Swami Ram allowed several experiments to be performed on his body. He was able to produce a 17-degree Celsius difference in one of his palms by specifically pumping more blood into one of his veins. At will, he was able to raise his heartbeat to 250 BPM, this is enough to give you a heart attack and even kill in some cases. He was able to produce different brain waves at will and even those ones which are only produced in a deep, dreamless sleep. He was conscious in deep sleep as well and recited 85% of what was spoken at the time of his deep sleep. Understand one thing, you can't hear or remember even a single word in a deep sleep. He even moved a needle just using his brain waves, the same feat was achieved by a person shown in Discovery's show called 'Stan lee's Superhuman'. All the feats achieved by him are related to involuntary muscle and body control and no human should be able to control these involuntary aspects of their bodies as suggested by its name. All the findings related to Swami Ram were published in 'Nature' journal somewhere between 1971-72, it is one of the highest regarded journals in the entire scientific world.

Whenever you hear a loud sound your body reacts shockingly without your brain specifically instructing it to do so, these responses are generated from your spine, not from your brain. Brain scans of advanced meditators have shown that their mind and body are so deep in the tranquility that it stops reacting to sudden noises and shocks. To get this level of control of your body is almost impossible, reacting to loud noises has been a direct result of evolution. These meditators have changed the very fundamentals of how a human body handles different sensory inputs. To make you understand how big this level of control is, it's like your eyes are open, but still, your mind is not creating images from all the light falling through your retina. Monks can extend their life spans by reducing their heartbeat, it's like going into hibernation. We all know that tortoises have one of the longest life spans and they have a heartbeat of around 5-6 BPM. One month practice of 'Shambhavi Mahamudra' starts showing a significant change in the neuronal activity of an average person.

The human brain is divided into two types neuronal networks, one is internal, and the other is external, the internal network is activated when you sit calmly and contemplate and the external network is activated when you are engaged with the outside world. These networks are like a see-saw, when one is activated other is deactivated automatically but advanced meditators have figured out a way to activate both these networks together and this gives them the feeling of oneness. Normal human beings can never experience themselves out of their body because they can't activate both the networks at the same time but various monks have described this feeling of oneness with the cosmos. Many yogis can survive without food and water for months and some for even years, I know most of us are cynical about these claims but I'll give you an example of how your mindset can change the amount of suffering you can handle. According to medical literature, an average person will die without food in 45-60 days, but Bhagat Singh disproved this fact by going on a hunger strike for straight 113 days and one thing to note here is that he never practiced fasting that may have increased his ability to starve for a long duration of time. It was his sheer will power, something similar to zen meditation where monks can sit for weeks in the same position without food, water, and loo breaks.

Most of you won't believe that there exist techniques that can give you powers like astral projections, studying in dreams, controlling your internal organs, and many more. Most people will never see the magical side of yoga, to experience all this, a certain number of meditational hours are required and people are not ready or able to put that many hours. Yoga is a proper scientific method with proper path and goals. Everything is clearly explained in yoga books like what happens to your mind when you practice a technique for a certain amount of time. I think this may have given you enough motivation to read further about yoga, a very plain and simple read for beginners is a book called 'Mindfulness in Plain English' by Bhante Gunaratana.