INTRODUCTION🔗

Nithyananda addresses the LA Yoga Community

I welcome you all with my love and respects.

Firstly, I will speak about the real experiences I had with a great yogi in my native place. Most of you are from the yoga community and I feel it will interest you. Then I will take your questions and respond to your questions.

Arunachala - Tiruvannamalai

The first thing I wanted to say is that hill near here looks just exactly like Arunachala. The place where I am born and brought up in South India is considered to be one of the great spiritual incubators on earth. An incubator is required for a premature baby. It is needed to take care of the baby until it can manage on its own. The incubator is needed to supply prana (air), food, water and all those kind of things. In the same way, for enlightened masters to land on the planet earth, they need a spiritual incubator. Arunacahala is a spiritual incubator. It is a space where so many masters have lived and left the body. Because of which, it has become a spiritual incubator. This very place today really reminds me of Arunachala.

When I spent time around him he was aged maybe around one hundred and four or five. He was a very healthy man and a man who had mastered yoga. He had experienced all aspects of yoga, not just in the physical level but in a much deeper way. He would express so many different powers of yoga. He would just take a stone and create a hammer sound. You know what sound is created when a hammer hits a stone. He would create that sound and the stone will break into two pieces!

He had a complete knowledge of the science of sound frequency. Simply by just using sound, he would be able to do anything! He would create a vibration and snakes will come from the bushes. He will just create the sound of a dog and from all over dogs would gather around him. Simply by sound he was able to do anything he wanted. He had amazing power.

Even the physical strength which he expressed can't be imagined. He would tie an iron rope around his chest and just inhale deeply and the rope would break into pieces.

Usually with a logical mind, one can't accept or understand that all this is possible but this great yogi proved it was all possible. I had the fortune to be around him. Not once but at least twenty times I saw him levitating. He would inhale deeply and the moment he inhaled and filled himself, his body would simply lift from the ground.

From the age of three to thirteen, I had the great fortune to study at his feet. Every day from morning until noon, for at least four to five hours, he would make me do all the techniques - asanas (yoga postures), neti, dauti (cleaning the body) and all those things. To tell you honestly, it is only now I feel happy about it. In those days I used to hate him because from six or seven o'clock in the morning he would start my training and it was practically torture. Any beginner in yoga will know how torturous it can be. He would make me bend this way, that way; right and left, backwards and forwards.

The temple where he used to teach me yoga has got a beautiful stone pillared mandapam (stone pillared hall). Raghupati Yogi would make me climb up and down the stone pillars. There were about twenty to thirty pillars I would have to climb up and climb down continuously. I am still not able to find any reference to support why he made me climb the pillars because no yoga sutra refers to this practice and I have not read in any yoga book that climbing pillars is a yogic technique! He would make me climb using one hand. I was not allowed to use both hands. I had to use only one hand, climb each pillar and come down. Also, he will make me swallow that long cloth to clean the intestine and the digetive system. He would make me do all kinds of things.

The stone pillared mandapam (hall)

Until the age of thirteen, he prepared the body and the mind to enter into the experience of enlightenment and to stay in the experience of enlightenment. Entering into the experience is not a big thing. To have a glimpse of the no-mind state, to have a satori, to have one experience of un-clutching is not a big thing at all. Actually it is not very difficult! But to stay in that state, not only stay in that state but also express that energy through your body, for that, your body and mind needs to be prepared. That is the real thing. Just having one glimpse is not a big thing. Anybody can have that. But staying in that same space, staying in that same consciousness and expressing it needs a little preparation. I think that is why Raghupati Yogi was concentrating on that aspect of my training. In so many ways, he really helped me to understand, to experience and, above all, to stay in that same space, to stay in that high energy plane and radiate that experience.

Nithyananda age 10 in padmasana (full lotus pose) with chin mudra