Deepak Chopra, Ram Dass, Krishna Das, Shyam Das

We just finished teaching with Deepak Chopra, Ram Dass, Krishna Das, and Shyam Das in Hawaii. Many people gathered for these retreats. For me to teach Yoga in this context is very auspicious because everyOne there has a sincere spiritual inquiry going on, otherwise they would not have taken the oportunity to come and meet us. Most everyOne before the retreat was not aware of the vital role a personal physical Yoga practice plays in the spirtual intention that teachers like Deepak Chopra and the Dass Brothers are bringing forth. in fact, most of the students there had previously, and justifiably rejected yoga as not being relevant to their spiritual Life because of the gross way yoga is taught as a muscular exaggeration and egoic effort. However, once given the technology of the nondual practice of Hatha Yoga, a tantric practice in which one celebrates their direct connection to Source, rather than striving to achieve God’s grace, it becomes obvious that this is their primary bhakti. By participating in the union of all polarities already Given, they are expressing devotion to Reality or God, within and without. It is easy for each person to learn because it is about intimacy with who you are, the extreme intelligence of Life, the very visibility and expression of Source. Without this practice it is very difficult to go beyond the dualistic presumptions that seem to seperate our ordinary Seen conditions and Source. These doctrinal ideas are present everywhere and we do not even know we have them. The social concept of looking for God itself creates the belief of God’s absence. Looking for something implies it is lost! By a careful nondual understanding and the practical means of the “ha tha”, we participate in the Given and are no longer searching for what was never lost.
Gratefully Ram Dass and Deepak acknowledge this equation and are encouraging their students to learn an approriate personal Yoga and I am happy to give it.
I also want to acknowledge the enormous public work that Deepak Chopra and Ram Dass, Krishna Das and Shyam Das have done to bring the understandings of the great traditions into the public mind of the west. Thank God.
it was a joy to see them together. It was great to give Ram Dass his Yoga at the age of 76 recovering from a severe stroke. I know he felt it as his whole body prayer to the One who loves him. Krishnamacharya always said that the nurturers of the community have a special right to practice Yoga because it is direct intimacy with our nurturing Source. I said to him, “Now the great nurturer is nurtured.”

Advertisement