4 Yoga for everyone We all are, and have to be, interested primarily in a way which yoga can benefit us in an improvement of our inner state. For, the problems of psyche, the soul and its condition are the very thing which nobody is protected against. The rich as well as the poor, the healthy as well as the ill, those competent as well as those incompetent, old as well as young, simply all of those who went wrong in what they expected from life, suffer. Therefore, they hope to escape personal suffering if they obtain riches, power, good health, or if they develop their mental abilities better. Not even those who are able to assume the most awkward positions of the hatha yoga teaching, are spared from that. Then, what is the point? No matter which good book about yoga we take in our hand we will always find there instruction about “yama” and “niyama” in the fore. It is yoga of its own kind, yoga, by which everyone should begin. “Yama” and “niyama” are simply yoga for everyone; moreover, all people can have even a fantastic success in it. When the Indian writings on yoga refer to “yama” and “niyama”, they tell what a person must not do and what they must do. That is because the Indian yoga is understood there as a training system, which doesn’t take into account the so-called individuality of a person. On the contrary, a person, who wants to do yoga according to the Indian sources, has to submit to the whole educational system that has a precise plan and a specific target. That target requires a deep depersonalisation, an ability to submit oneself, without allowing a person to slide into slavery, a slavish subordination. In relation to yoga according to Indian views, we can only sigh that we are Europeans, brought up to awareness that each person decides for themselves what they want or don’t want to do; we are people brought up to consider a lack of discipline to be a manifestation of personal freedom, a manifestation of a well developed individuality. Because of this, we cannot successfully do other yoga than the yoga adapted to the European mentality. It cannot be based on “you must” and “you must not”, but on one’s own responsibility on the way to mental and inner recovery: a halt on the way of steep decline, which leads to the deepest demoralisation. Yoga for everyone therefore, seemingly begins from the end: we will not sit in a position to become happy and to outshine our social environment. We are going to learn how to be happy, in order to be able to sit still and thus create conditions to be able to, of our own will, enter the transcendental world, which however has to be understood in a different way than until now. Thus, we are supposed to learn to be happy! Is it important at all and does it really belong to yoga? In the esoteric part of the teaching about yoga, we may learn that a horrific danger of the mystical heights can be neutralised by an appropriate level of optimism and joyfulness. Some writer of the so-called occult novels has written that if people laughed more, there would be fewer wars. Through this quote, we are already finding ourselves on our ground, on the earth, in the everyday life, the problems of which we will solve aptly by this “small” yoga, too. Spirituality Studies 1 (1) Spring 2015 87 (11)
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