Yoga Report

One of the students showing more advanced practices that he learnt elsewhere. photo: Michael Howden

Bihar School of Yoga offers an intense 3 weeks workshop for people interested in teaching yoga.  To be honest it felt more like a pilgrimage than participating in a course. For 11 years I practised yoga with the help of books containing teaching from Satyananda and I had teachers in Sweden and Denmark who got their teaching directly or indirectly from Satyananda.  I had a strong urge to see this man with my own eyes. What really struck me is how different this place is from the ashrams in Sweden. We sit on the floor when we eat, we are surrounded by people from the village when we sing kirtans, we participate in serving  food to kids from the village. The school in India is so closely connected to the surrounding. The singing and seminars in the evening is open to anyone and having kids climbing on you when you sit in a meditation pose was a new experience to me. Kids are spontaneous and seeing them dance classical Indian themes on the stage was such a joy. Some of the women on our course were teaching Computer Science and English to the kids from the surrounding area. One evening a young girl told the story of how life was in this area before the yoga school came. My heart melted when I heard about how people used to live for days without food in this area and now they got

 

Almost every evening we sang together. Here children from the village are performing a classical Indian Dance. photo: Michael Howden

education through the yoga school and they can make a living on the crafts they learned when working for the yoga school. People from the village came into the school during my stay and they worked hard with different tasks in the gardens etc. 

I learned from this course that yoga is very closely related to helping your fellow man in every way you can.

I got the chance to talk to Swami Satsangi and Swami Satyananda himself gave a lecture/speech for us one day. Satsangi made the strongest impression on me with her speech about how greed  is something we have to accept within ourselves since it is the reason why we are alive. Acceptance and awareness seems to be the keywords in this tradition.  

I have to admit that I had a flu during this course which I should have gone to a doctor with much earlier. The climate itself is very different from where I grew up and yoga is not a cure for everything I have to point out. The hygiene in the ashram is very good and I drank the tap water all the way through the course and off course my stomach was unbalanced once in a while and I ate tablets daily to keep the bacteria in shape in the stomach. On the negative side I am not a big fan of polished rice and we got this daily and usually 2-3 times a day.

During the course the very colourfull "holi" festival took place all over India and even inside the ashram people threw colour on each other this day. Photo : Michael Howden

I recommend this course to people who have been practicing yoga for many years and feel the urge to take the next step and begin teaching. I started teaching myself in a small scale straight after the course and I feel this is an important turning point in my life. You get the essentials for teaching on a beginners level and you get to lead 4 lectures in the course.

What i realise now 1,5 months after the course is that an essential part of the yoga teaching course is missing. The missing link is your own Sadhana. I notice a big difference in my own life when I do my schedule consisting of The Plough, the Bridge, the Headstand etc.  After 3 weeks of neck movements, shoulder joint rotations etc. I felt a big urge to go back to my own sadhana which there was no space and time for in Rikhia Peeth.  When I started to teach in a small scale I realised that when I spend 2 hours preparing a lecture and then 45 minutes on giving the lecture I felt happy that I made it but also very drained from creativity and energy in the evening. The balance between your own practice and your teaching  is important and as they say in the aeroplanes ”if you are in a plane together with a small child you first put on the oxygen to yourself in case of an emergency” . You are of no help to others if you are in bad shape !

In the beginning of the course I did my own practice/sadhana in my room and this was not a good place to do asanas I quickly realised. I was lucky enough to have my own room, most people where 2 persons in this space, but even then there was very little space for doing headstand for example. Then the addition of  people talking to late in the night and slamming doors etc.

Another thing which irritated me a bit was that there are no requirements for participating on this course. Some people had only done asana and pranayama for a few month and there was no real exam as such. Sure you get a certificate that you are a yoga teacher after this course but it is no way a guarantee that you have a deep knowledge of Yoga. I find this a bit strange since most serious yoga teacher courses with the Satyananda School in Europe run for  2-3 years where you have regular stays in an Ashram. The reason for this is maybe that there already exist a lot of university programs on yoga in India in case you want to go in depth with the asanas and the pranayama.

When i read the books by Satyananda on hatha yoga i got the impression that the Bihar School of Yoga is not connected to a specific religion but this is something I have to reconsider. On the course we read from the Bhagavad Gita and other scriptures and we used mantras. My personal view is that you can find knowledge and wisdom in the Qur’an, the Bible and Norse mythology as well.  I am bit fed up with the Superstition around Sanskrit. I say superstition because there is no conclusive evidence that the vibrations from talking sanskrit is really doing anything.  Sure it is fine with me if we had at least sung something in English when the course is said to be conducted in English. As the course is now it feels like it is mostly catering towards Indian people.

In general I found it really hard to get knowledge around this course and the price was 4 times more when I actually arrived on site compared to what was said on telephone. I pay 4 times more because i am not an Indian ! This is a problem for several reasons since you have to bring cash to the ashram and it is quite complicated and time consuming to get a permision to go to a cash machine.

I try to write this review as critical as possible and i have to add that I met a lot of wonderful people on this course and there were a lot of fun !

Books I really recommend for the serious sadhaka are Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha , Prana Pranayama Prana Vidya, Kundalini Tantra, A Systematic Course in the Ancient Tantric Techniques of Yoga and Kriya