Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding!

Five rings of the bell. It’s 5 am at Anand Prakash Ashram in the holy city of Rishikesh, India. My roommate stumbles to the bathroom and turns on the light so we don’t fall back to sleep. I throw on my white T-shirt & shorts and turn the fan up to hurricane mode. Inhale, elbows back, exhale, squat deep. 40 Chair breaths to wake up the body. I chug some water, grab my mat and walk upstairs to the Yoga Hall.

The room is dimly lit. Candles in every corner. Incense burning. Tired bodies are scattered all around the floor. I roll out my mat toward the front and get myself comfortable. I sit quietly for a moment. The bowl sings. For the next 30 minutes, it will be a battle between thought and awareness as I sit, learning how to meditate.

I had just read about ‘The Noble Failure’, a realisation that every beginner meditator experiences. A realisation that the mind is incessantly conjuring up thoughts – oscillating between clinging and aversion – and is incredibly difficult to quieten. It’s described as Noble because it’s the first step on any seeker’s path and requires a certain inquisitiveness and willingness to continue.

So here I sit, silently chuckling at how terrible I am at quietening my mind. I catch myself in thought. Sometimes a good few minutes have passed. I’d been doing yoga and feeble attempts at meditation for years. How could I have missed this?

This is my experience of journeying to the source.

It’d been a dream of mine to complete a 200 hour yoga teacher certification. Whether or not I wanted to teach yoga was not the question. After starting yoga when I was 18, I knew I needed to deepen my understanding of this ancient practice. Six and a half years after that first class in Perth, Western Australia, I found myself living in an ashram in the foothills of the Himalayas.

There were 32 of us from all over the world, plus 5 teachers who were equally diverse in their life experiences. It seems obvious now that, over the next 30 days, we’d become one big family, capable of living the rest of our lives in our own secluded commune. Like The Beach. But with less murder.

I could’ve chosen to do my 200 hour YTT at a retreat centre in Bali, surrounded by a smorgasbord of coconuts and Lululemon sports bras. Instead, I wanted to go deep. I wanted to experience the real deal. So the birth land of Yoga it was – complete with rice & Dahl and girls covered in baggy white clothing.

Yoga is not workout. It’s work in.

yoga-journey-1

Every morning, after the 30 minute confrontation with the mind, Yogrishi Vishvketu, the founder of Akhanda Yoga, would lead us through a 1 hour and 45 minute yoga class. Each day, we learned from this Himalayan Yoga Master. How to command and create a space for inner transformation. How to bring joy and celebration to every moment in life. How to connect to and love your Self.

Akhanda has a few principles to guide us inward toward the Self. Throughout the practice, we integrate the 5 elements of motion: Grounding, Uplifting, Centering, Expanding and Joy. While the West mainly focuses on the physical asana practice (with maybe some Ujayi breathing) in every Akhanda class, there’ll be an eclectic blend of asana, pranayama (literally meaning life force without restraint), sound, meditation and philosophy. Vishva-ji’s zest for life gave us permission to smile, laugh and be grateful for simply existing. He believes that this state of fearlessness, gratitude and bliss is our true nature – our birthright. I would agree.

Under the Akhanda banner, there are several different class formats including Akhanda Level 1, 2 & 3, Kundalini, Hatha-Raja, Five Koshas, Pranayama & Yoga Nidra. Each class is taught for a particular purpose, and unlike in the West, none of those is for recreation or a hot toned body.

According to Indian tradition, Yoga is an intensely disciplined practice for the purpose of the liberation of one’s mental and emotional disturbances that cause suffering. As indicated by Patanjali’s second sutra of Yoga (comparable to the second verse of The Yoga Bible), “Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.” When these fluctuations in mental and emotional states are quietened, we can find real peace, beyond conception. We can find bliss, not the transient type of ecstasy, but the feeling of love, gratitude and contentment. When you peel back all the layers, you find that this is who you truly are.

A more palatable explanation for the West could be in the sphere of the autonomic nervous system. As one deepens their yoga practice, they realise that, for the most part, ancient yogis had an incredibly accurate understanding of the body’s physiology. Science is now articulating how these ancient practices affect our body. Mindfulness meditation is the obvious example, but lesser known methods include the Brahmaree Pranayama – creating a loud, elongated ‘Mmm’ sound that vibrates the head. We now understand that humming releases neurotransmitters, namely nitric oxide, that relax our muscles and calm the mind.

Another example is chanting. While I felt some resistance to chanting verses praising Hindu deities in a foreign language, I later learned that chanting activates the vagus nerve, which is the main parasympathetic nerve – our rest and digest function. Breath retention also inhibits our sympathetic nervous system, as well as enhances the Bohr effect, which increases oxygen transfer from the blood into the cell. As for Vastra Dhauti – the swallowing of 21 feet of cloth to purify the digestive system – I will leave that for someone else to explain.

Naturally, we wanted to know how the name Akhanda came to be. When Vishva arrived in Canada 16 years ago, he barely spoke English. Despite running away to an ashram at the age of 8 and a PhD in Yoga from its birthplace, he couldn’t get a job teaching. He eventually earned a ‘Power Yoga’ slot at the local YMCA. He attended a few Power Yoga classes that week and was quite unimpressed. So he taught what he knew to be yoga: Hatha Yoga from 7th century India.

Luckily, the only two people in his class had never done any yoga before. Over time he grew a following, and people were asking what style he taught. He didn’t know that yoga had styles. Vinyasa, Ashtanga, Power, Yin, Iyengar, Bikram, etc. were all Western adaptations of Hatha Yoga. His PhD never mentioned any of these.

The chaotic jumping-pumping to hip-hop music in a Power Hour topped off with a 90-second savasana does very little for the ‘cessation of the fluctuations of the mind’.

After some frustration, he realised he needed to give his class a name. With a lot of meditation or “downloading” as he likes to call it, he came upon the name Akhanda, which literally translates to ‘whole’, ‘complete’ or ‘indivisible’ – much like the word Yoga. In effect, he called it Yoga Yoga. Clever guru.

While Western adoption of Yoga has certainly fuelled it’s popularity, there’s been a shift in the intention of the practice. Completing an Akhanda Yoga class gave me the feeling of balance, hyper-awareness and being connected to myself. I’ve finished several ‘Yoga-lates’ classes with a sense of being depleted, out of breath or overstretched. The chaotic jumping-pumping to hip-hop music in a Power Hour topped off with a 90-second savasana does very little for the ‘cessation of the fluctuations of the mind’.

This type of practice only exaggerates the ego or ‘I’ – the feeling of separateness that floods our Western culture. When this sense of separateness is strong, happiness and contentment are very fleeting.

Happiness is all there is.

With every decision and action that we make, our ultimate goal is to be happy. Sometimes you have to go through a whole universe of fear, anger, jealousy and despair – but if you dive down deep enough into the motivations for what you say and do, happiness will appear.

Taking this back to our mat, if we attend a yoga class for the purpose of increased flexibility, a better looking body, rehabilitation, injury prevention, or an emotional high, we’re only really doing what we think will make us happy. However, the fastest, but sometimes scariest, way to achieve this state of pure bliss is if we fall in love. If we love ourselves and other beings – pure, open-hearted love – then we can never feel unsafe, scarcity or fear.

This can only be achieved beyond the level of the mind as the mind is always creating separateness. The mind is what says that he/she is better than me or I am better than him/her. The mind is what says I could never do that or I deserve more.

The mind is what holds onto depressive memories of the past and projects fear and anxiety into the future. We must transcend the mind by letting go, and open our hearts to the present moment.

When I enrolled in a 200 hour YTT, I didn’t think I’d write a blog about love. In fact, when I first heard myself thinking this way, I was a little taken aback. But this is a blog about Akhanda Yoga, and this is the Akhanda approach. By taking our yoga off the mat and into the world, we’re achieving what ancient yogis practising in caves could hope for.

At the time of this writing, less than 24 hours ago, Donald Trump was elected president and the Western World is more than ever in a state of fear. This memoir is not about a journey to Rishikesh, India. It’s about a journey to The Source – your true nature. Open your heart. Reside there.