69. Intensity in Action is Yoga🔗

In my young age, in the temple where my yoga teacher Yogiraj Yogananda Puri would teach me yoga, there were twenty to thirty pillars. He would make me climb every stone pillar and come down. And I had to use only one hand to climb the pillars and come down! I had to do this from sunrise to sunset! One day I asked him why he was making me climb all these pillars, because I couldn't find any books or any sutras saying that climbing pillars was a part of yoga!

He said beautifully, 'Any movement you make with intensity and intention becomes part of your bio-memory. For whatever purpose you bend your body or move your body, that memory and idea will become completely recorded in your body and mind. That samskara will start expressing in your body.'

This was a strong click. With a strong intensity, any movement done is Yoga. I can say, this is the basis of our Nithya Yoga. Nithya Yoga is not about adding more movements to your life; it is adding more life to your movements. Without intensity, even if you do so-called yogasanas, it will be more or less like an exercise, not yoga.

My yoga teacher said, 'When you bend your body with intensity for some purpose, that purpose becomes part of your prarabdha.'

Understand: Prarabdha is the energy with which you create your body every day out of hiranyagarbha. Hiranyagarbha is the space where you rest every night. Every night, you fall asleep into hiranyagarbha. It is the darkness which you experience in the deep sleep; it is the womb of the cosmos. It is the place all memories are available, like a cosmic archives. If you want to become a football champion, whatever is needed for that - health, intelligence - will be available to you. If you want to become a rich man, all those memories are available to you.

Listen: every night is your death; every morning is your birth.

Every morning when you take your body, based on the thought which inspires you to take your body, you bring those kind of memories out of hiranyagarbha. If you think, ‘I should get up so that I can go to work’, then you bring with you whatever you need to do for making that happen. That kind of memory will be inserted, downloaded into your system, which you need to lead your life.

That is why, in the Vedic tradition, the first thought you have in the morning is given so much of importance.

The moment you get up, you are expected to bring divine energies, divine mantras, divine chants and divine feelings into your being, so that you bring that kind of prarabdha for yourself.

I can say that short death is sleep, long sleep is death! So, every morning when you get up, all the prarabdha is available for you. You can do anything, you can exchange anything.

You may be thinking, it is too much, it looks like a too big thing! It can’t be possible!

It is! Please understand, out of habit, you keep bringing back the same set of samskaras. If you decide to change from today, you CAN change! If you want to be a different person, if you strongly create a new thought every morning, you will see that you are expressing that kind of memory, that kind of prarabdha, that kind of energy, those kind of samskaras; you will start radiating that, you will start living that.

Patanjali says that any thought which you put inside you strongly, intensely, becomes your bio-memory, When you fall asleep with a certain thought, the next morning when you wake up, you will pick up that kind of prarabdha and come out and live it. You can try this yourself if you want!

Understand: Anything you do with intensity becomes yoga. If you carry intensity always, all your movements will become yoga. Patanjali beautifully describes in this one sutra that all you need is abhyasa and vairagya. In the further sutras, we will look more deeply at abhyasa and vairagya.

Fall asleep with the thought of what you want to achiEve the next day. ThE next morning you will pick up that kind of prarabdha and come out and live it.