What is Sadhana?

Sadhana

I am sure you all know what sadhana means already. And you know what sadhana is a regular spiritual practice, kind of like a regular daily practice. So first we have our sankapla – our intention… so how do we make this happen…how to we live out our intention?

Sadhana, is one of the things that can allow us to make this happen, right. If we have a regular daily practice.

Now, in this course, your sadhana is several things we asked you to do some meditation, do some pranayama. Do some Asana, do some journaling. This is our practice, right.

This is our own personal practice. The rest of the course is more Study and Learning. But in your sadhana is your practice, it’s for you to experience.

The, main thing is for you to learn, like to go into that state and to experience a practice. And this is where the most learning is going to come from right, this is where you’re really going to learn about yourself is through your practice, for the next 35 days, but then really the truth is, for the next 35 years right.

Sadhana, means of regular daily practice. But it has to have something to do with an intention, right, just doing a regular daily practice without an intention is not really the full definition of sadhana. Sadhana means we have some intention some direction we’re moving. So oftentimes we would call sadhana, a regular daily practice with intention for spiritual growth. So as some, we would have a sense of which direction we’re moving when we have sadhana, right. So sadhana, is can be anything can be anything that we do regularly. There’s many different things and yoga practices. But the truth is sadhana can be any practice from any spiritual tradition, any tradition, or something that you make up. Most recently, my main sadhana has been going for a walk in the woods on my own. Right. And just like getting my body moving, being out in nature, not having my phone not having anything and just walking in the, in the wilderness, and in the beauty of nature, and this has been one of my sadhana practices.

There’s many different things that you can do with sadhana, and I think this is a great thing you can explore through this course, and then through the next year of figuring out what really can be your sadhana, that you can do can be your home base of practice for a long period of time. In the Yoga Sutras, they say that this is what allows yoga to happen is having a regular practice over a long period of time. It’s not something that we can do a couple times, and expect to have life changing things. Even if we do it and we have a life changing thing, right, maybe we’ve experienced at my first yoga class, I felt like, it was just amazing. I felt so different afterwards. This can happen, but if we don’t go back and keep doing it. That feeling will fade and then we’ll go back to our, how we were feeling previously. So over the course of our life, that one class probably didn’t have as big of an impact as if we were going regularly. Sadhana has several components one is a practice it’s practice so we’re doing something intentionally as we have a some type of intention, and then the regularity of it. So this is what sadhana is.

We call it sadhana yoga school because that’s the main thing it’s like okay so it’s has this component of spiritual practice, regular daily spiritual practice and this is what it’s all about, like, our practices where we’re going to learn, our practice. We talked a little bit tomorrow about guru and the gurukula system and traditional ways that yoga was taught.

Now we’re in the age, the modern Guru is you. You are the guru, you are the teacher for yourself.

You’re the one that has the answers.

You know in this age of technology, there’s an information there’s unlimited information out there. Right, just you just type it in, read and listen, watch.

But then how do we know what is real and unreal for you what is true and untrue for you.

This is where you are your own guru, right. You are your own teacher.

We’re here, we’re all here to share with each other what we know, what has worked for us what hasn’t worked for us.

But, you are the one that needs to decide what’s gonna work for you in your life.

You’re the one that’s going to need to know. Okay, when I quiet my mind and listen to my heart and my intuition, you are the only one that’s going to know.

So this sadhana helps us with this.

Sadhana helps us to be able to listen to ourselves and be ourselves. Life, I know for me, I can wake up feeling one way and then I can feel many different ways throughout the day, right, my day can, I can be having the best day, ever and then get some news and I just feel like I’m having the worst day ever, and then I get some other news and it’s backup to be the best day right and then same thing our weeks right we can have the best week, or not the best week or month, best month, the best month or year this year, not the best year our decade right, life will take us on a roller coaster.

When we’re in the mind.

We have our sadhana which connects us. We required the mind for a little moment. Maybe not right, our old sadhana practice, but there’ll be a moment or moments in our sadhana practice when the mind is somehow a little bit calmer a little bit quieter, we’re not attached to everything that’s going on into the world. And we can listen to our heart we can listen to who we are. So this is what sadhana does and we do this regularly. It’s like visiting yourself every day. Visit yourself every day.

We don’t want to just be living this other life, for other people for society, for friends, for family, whatever what else wants us to do right we don’t want to just be living somebody else’s life. We want to check in and visit ourselves every day. And listen to ourselves every day. What do I want in this life. What am I here for. This is Sadhana.