Study YOGA

TRANSCRIPT

PRASAD RANGNEKAR

Amy:

Welcome to the Study Yoga Online Summit. If you are seeking beyond the sea of superficial yoga flooding your feed, yearning for insightful conversations and community, or are a sincere seeker devoted to the depths of studentship, then the Study Yoga Masterclass series is the nectar that you need. Prasad Rangnekar is a yoga educator based in Mumbai, India, who for around 30 years has been teaching yoga as a science of a mind-body-life transformation. For Prasad, Yoga is more than a pursuit of poses. It is a process of breaking free from our fundamental mind body limitations to realize who we truly are. He’s the founder director of Yoga Prasad Institute and conducts yoga teacher trainings, mentorship sessions, retreats and workshops to spread the wisdom of yoga in its most traditional sense. Prasad has had the blessing of studying under many accomplished yogic masters undertaking many pilgrimages across India and Nepal, retreating to ashram monasteries in solitude, and immersing in learning different aspects of yoga under great adepts from various yogic traditions. Specifically, Prasad had the honor of studying Shaiva Advaita Tantra, Vedanta, and the deeper teachings of the Natha Hatha yogis. Prasad’s most profound teacher is silence, Mauna. He takes four months off his extensive travel schedule every year since 2013 to go deeper into silence, meditation, and study. He drinks from that quiet place within and shares humbly through his work. Prasad, it is a real honor to speak with you. Welcome.

Prasad:

Thank you so much for having me.

Amy:

Yes, thank you for being here. You have a profoundly impactful way of articulating all that you share online. Hence, as you know, I have outlined some concepts that and teachings that you’ve shared with us to guide our conversation, things that you’ve shared on social media that I’d love to delve into more deeply with you. So may we begin by addressing the tendency toward a pursuit of happiness, often called sukha, along the path of yoga, we can easily fall into the trap of thinking that yoga will be or should be some kind of path that is primarily aimed at not just removing us, moving us away from suffering, but thereby bringing us closer to some level of happiness and perhaps a sense of comfortability. So why are we seeking this happiness through yoga? What is alternatively the primary goal? What’s the deeper understanding that we need to reveal here?

Prasad:

Well, as I understand, yoga has always been extremely practical and applicable, and the origins of yoga have been in answering the problem of suffering. Philosophically, it has been more about reflecting and giving solution to the problem of suffering. So because suffering was very in the face for people of the past. For the modern humans, suffering is more of a cognitive psychological reality. But for people of the past, death, disease was staring in the face, right? So everyone suffers, and that is something common. We don’t know if everybody’s happy, but we know that everybody suffers. If you just take a look at people, you’ll find more people who will confess about their suffering than those who will honestly admit that they’re happy. And that’s why Bhagavad Gita calls this empirical material world as Dukha-laya means literally the aboard of suffering.

So the ancients, they deeply had a realistic view of life, not an unnecessarily positive view of life. And in that sense, they admitted to the fact that we all suffer and finding solution to suffering was the primary objective of their exploration. Now, the thing is, we also know that we suffer. We may not admit, but we all suffer. And suffering doesn’t have to be something exotic. It could be mild pain, it could be discomfort, it could be your resentment. So suffering is a very broad term under which all these, so-called uncomfortable discomforting aspects of life are coupled. So now if we admit that solution, problem of suffering has to have a solution, then the solution, we think of that solution going somewhere completely opposite, right? So we just inverse suffering into happiness, and then we go about the pursuit of happiness. So I don’t want to suffer. That means I want to be happy, so I’ll go looking for happiness.

So it’s, nothing wrong in that impulse. If you’re tired of suffering, if you have had enough of suffering. You go in search of suffering. Yoga or even tantra does not necessarily say no to that. But something interesting happens here. If we go in pursuit of happiness, then we have to understand where will we go for happiness? What do we know about happiness? So where will we go? We will go in the external world of objects because the only thing we know is materiality. That’s where the mind naturally goes. So we start looking for happiness in things, stuff.

And well, we cannot say that material stuff doesn’t give us happiness. And when I say material, I don’t mean only things, but also thoughts. Not only material objects, but also mental objects. So it is object based. So the term in Sanskrit is Vishayasukha, object based suffering. So we go there, our mind moves outwardly, our senses move outwardly, and the only place they finally lock into is material things, better house, bigger car, better, 12 inch pizza, not just eight inch beats kind of stuff. But this is where the limitation of our awareness comes in because we think that the only world out there is the material world, and the only place, or the only thing that can give us suffering is the material thing. So we don’t actually know the nature of the things that we get addicted to.

The pursuit of happiness becomes so unbridled that we just go on consuming relentlessly without giving a thought to the nature of what we are consuming and what is the nature of the thing that we are so obsessed about? That it is transient. And because the nature of that thing that we pursue for happiness is transient, our happiness that is predicated upon that thing is also transient. So our happiness is are bite-sized, as they call nowadays. And the moment we bite on one stuff, it’s gone, disappears. We don’t know this because we are so busy in consumption of thoughts and things that we just fail, fail to realize the nature of transience that is inherent in the objects. So what really happens is our pursuit of happiness ends up becoming an experience of suffering.

And that… so pursuit of happiness also becomes suffering. So first we have suffering because of which we go in the direction of pursuit of happiness. And then because we have non knowledge or ignorance of the nature of things that we pursue, our pursuit also becomes suffering. So it’s suffering, suffering everywhere. And that somewhere is an awakening that somewhere is a wake up call. So the ancients, the yogis went through all these things of experience and reflection, and they said that there has to be some solution of suffering that is beyond the level of materiality. And this is where the direction of search, of yoga is not just in a plane of material, mental pursuits, but somewhere else. And that direction is in the pursuit of spiritual happiness.

Yeah. And the whole of yoga is about that. And that’s why yoga is called as nivrtti-marga, nivrtti means literally withdrawal. It’s a path of withdrawal. So we are gradually withdrawing from our neediness towards thoughts and things and through the practices moving towards that state of being which is inherently happy. Now, this needs to be understood a little bit. There’s a very clear distinction in yogic philosophy between happiness, which is object-based, and bliss, which is unconditional. Unconditional bliss is called ananda. Ananda is inherent. Ananda is not dependent on anything. Why? Because ananda or innate bliss is the very nature of our being, whatever you call it, atma or shiva or whatever it is. So path of yoga says that if we care to look beyond the transient bite-sized excitatory experiences of object-based happiness, there is this infinite source of bliss waiting for us.

So yoga does not say, don’t pursue happiness, but yoga says, don’t settle for less, pursue happiness, but if you pursue happiness in a shopping mall, it is transient. It’ll give you suffering again. So why don’t dig a little more and bathe in that infinite, unbound, nameless, formless fountain of freedom that is called as ananda. So that’s a direction yoga gives and this bliss, innate bliss. So it doesn’t come from anywhere else, neither external thoughts nor internal external things, not internal thoughts. For that, what we require is a very quiet mind, unless the mind becomes quiet, that fountain of happiness, the fountain of bliss will not be experienced. And therefore, to cut the long story short, the entire pursuit of yoga is to make the mind calm. Whichever yoga you take, Patanjali-s, or bhakti or whichever yoga you take, the whole idea is to make the mind calm so that you realize who you are and the more you realize who you are, the lesser the dependency, the psychological dependency on transient objects. And that’s why, there’s a line in Chandogya Upanishad, it’s a pre Buddhist upanishad which says, limitation is suffering and expansion is happiness. So I personally love this definition because it just tells us that the direction of where we should move, not just transient bouts of happiness, but permanent stable experience in realization of inner bliss.

Otherwise, what happens is we just keep swinging. We are like, our mind becomes like a oscillating pendulum. On one side it is extremely happy. And then even neurologically, a heightened excited response. If you cannot regulate your nervous system, there’s a crash.

So if you look purely from the upanishad-s and Bhagavad Gita point of view, they do not advise you pursuit of happiness, especially Bhagavad Gita advises the pursuit of something called a Samattva or equanimity. Yoga is not about, kind of what you call that, swinging from branch to branch. Yoga is about making your own hammock and resting it, the hammock of equanimity. And then however long and tall the tree is, you’re held firmly by the hammock of equanimity. You don’t have to swing from one branch of happiness to a slightly bigger branch of happiness like a Tarzan, including the screams!

Amy:

Prasad. It makes me think of many practitioners of yoga out there who are really dedicated to the essence of yoga and the deeper teachings. But we can also get caught up in a, it’s more innocent sort of striving for perceived sense of happiness perhaps, or fulfillment through just a craving, studying and craving knowledge and reading more and acquiring more. And of course this is useful to some degree and in certain contexts, but how many texts can we read and how much of this can we learn and learning, learning, learning. But we’re not actually assimilating, and I don’t like to use, it’s a bit of a cliche now, but embodying and immersing in that, and I’m sure you come across that..

Prasad:

Yeah, I’ve written a lot about this, about, I call it marinating. You have to marinate in the study because yes, yoga is about living the practice and not just doing the practice. So you’re absolutely right because it’s like for honest seeker, for sincere seekers like us, when we come to realize there’s so much knowledge out there, our state of mind is like that of a kid in a candy store. Then we go about buying books and doing classes and attending lectures, which has its own place in the larger scheme of things. But as far as I understand, one day you will, I’m not saying not study, but the nature of the study will change. There was a philosopher called Ludwig Wittgenstein from Austria a hundred years ago, and he wrote something very interesting that he said, use whatever I’ve said like a ladder, and once you reach that, throw away the ladder. So it’s something like that. Ultimately we have to realize that yoga is not about gain. Maybe this is a very radical statement that I’m making. Yoga is not about gain. Yoga is about loss. And you lose everything. Everything only to realize that’s something that you will never lose because that is what you truly are.

So that’s the journey. So the journey of yoga is a journey of loss. That’s why it’s called vairagya, that’s why it’s called nivrtti, it’s not a pravrtti, path of accumulation, it’s a path of gradual detachment.

Amy:

It might sound like a lofty goal, but perhaps it’s understanding that naturally we are in a constant dualistic state. But to try and withdraw from that to some degree or to come into greater neutrality to see, and again, coming back to the study and the knowledge and the learning, I’ve seen this in myself and I know so many people listening can probably relate to enrolling in so many courses and trainings and studies, but never completing them because you’re onto the next thing. And so not only have you not completed that thing, but you haven’t actually completed it and then taken it into your life. And I distinctly remember personally putting a stop for a while there on courses and studying. I went no more, no more. I could continue to revisit everything I’ve already done time and time again with a new lens. And something I really appreciate about what you’ve sort of alluded to, let’s say through social media, is the shastra, the yogic texts, we could pick one of them, just one and immerse in that deeply and spend a lifetime trying to understand it. And this is such a change in paradigm, I think particularly for the Western mentality that is just so used to just getting whatever they want whenever they want. And just having that access, which is a wonderful gift in many ways, but can be a bit of a curse as well,

Prasad:

Because we confuse information for knowledge and knowledge for wisdom

When yoga talks about all this. But the peak of yoga is neither knowledge nor wisdom. The peak of yoga is something that is called as prajna, or the light to shine within by itself. So you get information, think of it as a knowledge, then you put it in practice, and then you become wiser and wiser and wiser, and gradually the light of self shines within you automatically. Organically. That is called prajna. So prajna happens. You don’t buy five books and become have prajna. That is something we need to understand. But that’s how our pedagogy is, last 200, 300 years, we’ve pursued, pursued knowledge from empirical reality. So even in yogic field, we think more is better. And the more hours I have studied, the better teacher I will be. But all this one has to go through and it’ll come crashing. In everybody’s life. Life itself, if you’re a sincere seeker, life itself will open your eyes. Even if you don’t want to, life will open your eyes until you don’t open your eyes life will bring you experiences that will open your eyes to realizing that external pursuits can only take you so far and then you just sit quietly with yourself. That is in chapter number five of Gita, is called anta sukha, anta sukha means inner happiness.

You are satisfied by yourself. And that is the literal goal of happiness in yoga.

Amy:

And it’s very likely that that is the fundamental desire or seeking to connect with, but we’re just not aware of it.

Prasad:

Absolutely. That is that inner desire. Why do we like to go out in open? Why do we prefer being in open ground and not in a 10 square foot apartment? It’s because of that innate drive to be free, not just humans. Nobody likes to be trapped. Nobody likes to be in prison. Even small insects don’t. The mosquito keeps dashing against the window if you shut the window on the mosquito. So it’s no sentient being likes to be restricted. That’s because the nature of that being whichever form it may have taken, is itself freedom.

Amy:

Yeah, I love that analogy. It’s not even an analogy. It’s the reality, the mosquito and the fly, the window. That’s so cool. And my sense is that this will actually quite perfectly lead us into and relate to the next question or direction that I would love to take this with you. The Sanskrit word shraddha often is used to suggest a type of, let’s say, faith or surrender, particularly in the context I find at least more commonly with respect to the relationship with a guru. And recently you shared some thoughts about a similar Sanskrit word sharanagati, which also most commonly I think implies surrender. And I can’t help but sense that we collectively are being more and more resistant to this act or this process of surrender. So would you reveal your thoughts around sharanagati or your insight into this willingness to surrender on the path?

Prasad:

For me personally, shraddha is the most important virtue you can develop on the path of yogic spirituality or any spirituality. You take, any spiritual religious book, everybody will talk about faith so much so that whenever you say faith in your writings or even your speech, immediately people relate it to religious faith. There have been instances where I’ve said, have faith, and people are like, but I’m not religious. I said, it’s not about that.

We say people of different faiths. What does it means? Basically people of different religious ideas. No, the word should not be restricted to this one meaning. So for me, faith is something that you strongly believe in. A firm conviction. In 17 chapter Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says, whatever your faith is in whatever your shraddha is in, means, that’s how you are. So literally, whatever you are, whatever conviction you have in whatever you have conviction in, you kind of manifest that or you become that. So if you’re convinced there’s a monster behind the door, when the room lights are switched off, you will see a monster.

So it’s literally like that. And your neighbor may not see a monster. The neighbor just sees plain darkness. So as one conceives, someone becomes, as they say. It should literally, because our mind works through pictures, the whole philosophical picture theory of meaning. But what yogis did is that yogis, the ancient yogis realized the power of projection of mind and said that we can use this power of projection for liberation. And that’s why yogis, the ancient saints and mystics of yoga proposed that we should have shraddha conviction in something higher, something much more grander, something much more powerful, stronger than us, than our mind, than our ego. And that’s why, Gita says, only the ones who have shraddha generate wisdom. And I love this line. Only when you are firmly convinced, you become kind of a crucible for that knowledge to come into you. It actually reminds me of Saint Augustine, Saint Augustine’s line, which is faith is to believe what you don’t see so that you see what you finally believe.

So faith is the most important aspect of yogic spirituality, and faith doesn’t always have to be in something higher. Somebody who does asana, just a small aspect of yoga, can have faith shraddha, in the healing abilities of asana. So start with that. So for me, as far as I have experimented with faith, because in my life, one of the two main, my whole sadhana right now in my wherever I’m in life is about two things. One is Sharanagati, surrender, and the other is silence. So my entire sadhana is just these two things. So since you spoke of surrender, I want to retract a little bit because you cannot have surrender or you cannot surrender unless you have firm faith, because surrender without faith is a sense of loss.

But spiritual surrender is not a sense of loss. And that’s why faith is extremely important. Believing in something that is bigger than you, grander than you, wiser than you in a small way. You spoke about guru, it could be guru, it could be God, it could be some deity, it could be your teacher, it could be the practice itself. Yoga is ancient. So many people have benefited. I will entrust my faith in yoga and do my practice. That also is enough. But here I want to give out a warning that the faith will be tested, no matter which state of spiritual seeking you are. Faith is always tested. Faith develops over time. Number one, faith develops over time with trial and error.

And trial and error means that faith will be tested, not by some embodied teacher or somebody, but life itself is the biggest teacher, and the faith will be tested by life itself. Now, what does life, what will life test? Life will test how strongly you’re rooted in following the principles of yoga or whichever spiritual path you choose to walk on. Life will test you till your faith becomes unshaken. And Ananja, it’s called the term in Bhakti yoga, Ananja means not other, no one else. So the faith becomes so one pointed, single-minded that there is no reason or there is no need to shake, going from faith in this faith in that till then you’ll be tested. Now, once you reach that level of faith, the natural organic evolution of this level of unflinching faith is surrender. So surrender, we can practice surrender like, oh, I missed the flight. Okay, kind of that day-to-day surrenders are like pratyahara exercise. It works. But I’m talking about allowing your mind to evolve to that stage where surrender naturally kicks in. This is called sharanagati or samarpan, is another word to it, Samarpan. Like I said, surrender doesn’t feel like a defeat.

You don’t feel like you’ve lost. It’s very different to the surrender that happens in the battlefield. When one army surrenders to another army, you don’t need to have faith in the new ruler. No, it could be just fear. Fear-based surrender. But this surrender is opposite completely. It’s not about defeat and victory. It’s a voluntary relinquishment of your free will. That is something that is a mature practice. It does not happen with a sense of loss. It is voluntary. It’s like gifting. That’s why surrender happens in humbleness. You have a hundred dollars and somebody comes and you just take these a hundred dollars, but what about you? I’ll figure something out. Take it, something like that. So it’s literally, it’s at our level. We can understand it as a sense of loss without the feeling of loss.

Amy:

I’m paraphrasing, but on the social media posts that you put about sharanagati, again, this is paraphrasing, but it was all within sort of one sentence or paragraph. But you said this is detachment, not defeat. I thought that was a really beautiful clarification.

Prasad:

Yes, absolutely. Detachment and not defeat because this detachment from the objective world, object-based material world, and attachment to the spiritual word. So detachment from one without a sense of loss, but out of a deep sense of belonging. So when surrender happens, you have this deep sense of belonging as if embraced by your beloved or divine or whatever you want to call it. There’s absolutely no, and because surrender is faith is a prerequisite of surrender. There is no worry, there is no worry of what will happen or what if, there’s no what if there’s no what will, you just move on with whatever comes, whatever doesn’t come.

It is, I’ve written it somewhere else. It is the deepest relaxation you can experience in this physical form as a human, when there are no questions from life anymore and you just make it as you go because the faith is so strong, this for me is surrender. I’m not getting into the metaphysics of it and all that. Ultimately you have to let go of the need to control. And you said it, it’s difficult for us to surrender. It’s because what happens is when we are in anxiety, when we are dominated by fear, we clench tighter to what we have.

We tighten our fists to not let go of whatever we have. So when anxiety kicks in, you are not going to surrender. When anxiety kicks in, you’re going to hold it tighter and that itself will stop you from surrendering. So it’s almost paradoxical. So ultimately surrender is detachment from your need to control. And when you say your need to control whose need it is, it is the need of your false sense of self. So when the yogis talk about surrender or sharanagati, they are saying drop the need to control the need that is based in a fictitious idea of self. So gradually, one, it does something called as leap of faith, and it really is the leap of faith. The term was coined by a European philosopher called Søren Kierkegaard, and he spoke about leap of faith. And for me, this is the shortest way in which one can address the topic of surrender. It’s a leap. Why? It’s a leap because nobody’s pushing. You have to stand there and decide. Leap. The word is so beautiful, you are leaping. It’s not like somebody pushes you like the bungee jumping. Sometimes you see they’re not supposed to push, but sometimes they push. So it is your choice to just jump. It comes across as illogical because you don’t see anything there. And that’s why many people will surrender after a lot of grief and loss.

Many people will naturally organically surrender after going through very deep personal crisis. This is how yoga saints have become saints, because life’s snatched everything away from them. Even Søren Kierkegaard himself who wrote about this. His whole philosophy is called philosophy of despair. So yeah, that’s why it is. It is a slightly mature practice,

I would say. So how do we practice it at our level? Well, first, find somebody to entrust your faith in. Could be a guru, could be a teacher, could be an ideal, like an ethical ideal, Satya, whatever. Just let go of your need to control and say, Hey, there is something more out there than my own need to control everything. That’s a good start on the path of surrender, by finding somebody to have faith in and then gradually deepening your faith in that person till you reach a tipping point where the faith naturally culminates into surrender.

Amy:

It’s very much a maturation.

Prasad:

Absolutely. And it kicks in. It kicks in, and you can sense it because your worries. You’re like, Hey, 10 years ago I would’ve worried myself mad because of this one thing. And now I’m just like, okay, let’s move on. Wow, how did that happen? Or consciously, literally thanking the higher ideal for anything and everything. Good or bad, everybody rushes to the temple or the place of worship when they are in crisis. But only when you rush to the temple out of sheer love of seeing your deity, that is loving surrender. Sometimes in some books I see, they translate Sharanagati as loving surrender, and I like that prefix, loving surrender. And everybody, Rumi talks about it, Hafiz his talks about it, even intellectual yogis like Shankaracharya and all who worked with logic and argumentation, they also will talk about this. So it’s a very, very important dimension in yogic spirituality.

Amy:

I must admit, the only time other than your post sharing about sharanagati, the only time that the word has really become on my radar is from the Devi Mahatmyam, the Narayani Stuti, and that’s where I’m familiar with it. But it was interesting because in preparation for our conversation, I did a little bit of research and I too had a look at a definition of the word as well, a Sanskrit definition, and it was approach for protection. And I was like, wow, that’s really beautiful approach for protection. And I feel like that is, it’s another layer of surrender as well. You’re approaching something a higher, however you would want to say, whether it’s God or a higher self, higher whatever. It’s allowing yourself to approach that and having the trust to be protected. And even you said in the same social media post, you said, and this is a quote from you, what we need is more trust, not techniques. I was like, ah!

So good.

Prasad:

Absolutely. Yeah.

Amy:

I actually would love to read just a few lines from your social media post because I just thought it was so wonderful. So before we move on to the next our last little bit of the dialogue here, I’d just love to read this for the listener, and of course they can go to your social media post on Instagram and find it. But you said “surrender is the last choice. The seeker exercises the choice to fall. It is the final conscious act, the voluntary giving up of all personal sovereignty, the so-called free will that we so strongly clinging to like shraddha, sharanagati two grows over time through participating in life. The furnace of life has to bake us enough for us to deeply recognize its value and one has to mature toward it”, which it’s just beautiful words and summarizes so perfectly everything that you’ve shared and expanded upon here. So thank you so much for that. And you said that part of your practice at the moment is the surrender and also silence. And so I would love you to finally here, share your experience and thoughts on silence, mauna, silence as a practice, perhaps as a tool for self transformation and how we can benefit individually and collectively from embracing the observation, let’s say, of silence, observing it formally.

Prasad:

Silence is a legit practice in yogic sciences. It is always been, there is a line in one book called Panchatantra that “maunam sarvArtha sAdhanam” means “silence is the solution to all problems”, but also “maunam prAjnasya bhooshaNam” means “silence is a mark of wisdom”. So in my life, personally, I am in pursuit of silence since last 12 years, because time came in my life as a seeker that I was done with wrangling, with philosophies and modalities and argumentation. Why this is this and why this is that. So I literally knocked on the doors of reflection. I banged on the windows of philosophy to realize that there is another spacious room inside, which is a room of quietude, silence. So for me, it was an organic pursuit moving from all the intellectualization to find sitting quietly with myself.

How can we, you asked how can we use silence as a practice, right? Just talking about silence makes my mind’s quiet. But it is very interesting because there’s a line in Dakshinamurti Stotra, there’s a prayer to Shiva, which says that the guru teaches through silence, and that silence liberates the disciple from all doubts. So Shiva as a guru, teaches in silence. Is what is said. So because silence is not just about shutting your mouth, silence is also about shutting your mind. What perhaps potentially calls as vrtti-nirodha. Now that just like our practice of surrender is a slightly mature practice, practice of silence is also a slightly mature practice. Because we are so hardwired to productivity, we are so hardwired to multitasking that just sitting quietly and not doing anything is disastrous for our sense of value. In my lie,. I have consciously spent six years, and I am telling this to you because I’ve done it consciously, six years, my practice was just to get bored.

So I started off meditation and then I said, no, this is just coming, my productivity conditioning is just coming between my meditation practice. So I used to meditate, but not so much, but then I should just sit and get bored. That was my whole obsession for six years till my mind got so bored, so bored, and it was literally cognitive hell so to say. And gradually in the fifth year and the whole effervescence of the mind started coming down. So the point that I’m making here is we are so hardwired to productivity. The productivity conditioning, as I call it, that needs to be gradually regulated if we really want to practice mauna. In fact, I was reading many months ago, I was reading about a scientific study that they did in which the students were asked, will you give yourself electric shocks in certain situations? They said, no, no, come on, come on. And then experimentally, they were made to sit in a room and do nothing, and then they got bored and there was a device there, which gave them simple electric shocks, shocks as stimulation, and they started stimulating themselves.

So this is something very, very crucial that we need to recognize. It’s not productivity, not in the sense of doing something, even just going on Instagram. And then suddenly it’s like a time dilation. You say, I’m just going to go on Instagram for five minutes, and then suddenly it’s two hours. So we are so, or the quantitativeness of life, if you Amy sit for meditation for half an hour and somebody that your friend does something else for half an hour, immediately, he’s like, what did you do? I went on the treadmill. I burned 500 calories. What did you do? I just sat and meditated. There’s no quantitative value attached to that 30 minutes of activity. And we have become so wise in our mind that’s very, very, very, very difficult to come off it. That’s why if somebody wants to take up meditation as a practice, because ultimately it is a practice of dis-engaging, and we have to, modern humans have to, learn to disengage.

Many, many people don’t like to be with themselves, forget alone. They don’t like to be with themselves. I really like seeing people just sitting on a park bench looking here and there. Like, wow. Imagine a situation, you go in a tram or you go in a metro and you see somebody just sitting and looking up at the roof, people will not sit next to that person. People will rather sit next to somebody who is reading a book or listening to something or watching something on the phone. Why? Because now we have come to such understanding that somebody sitting quietly by themselves in the metro looking up at the ceiling is some kind of weirdo or he’s high on something, you see? So if we really want to use mauna as a practice, then we have to really understand that it’s a practice of disengagement and there needs to be some amount of self contentment and some amount of readiness or happiness of being with yourself that needs to be cultivated prior to jumping into mauna.

So my simple tips would be that start small. If you want to really focus on, I would highly recommend silence as sadhana, but we need to start small, small in the sense we have to actually steal time from our other tasks because we are householders, we have sense of responsibility things to do. So you have to take time off our schedule without any shame and without any guilt. And start small, maybe 10 minutes sit, do nothing. Or if it’s difficult for you to sit and do nothing, do something that is not your usual thing. That is don’t sit for 10 minutes and just Google stuff. Sit and draw something, and just reduce your engagement. Remember what I said, it is a practice of disengagement. So gradually, gradually increase the time and reduce your engagement. And this is how over time, one will learn how to quieten the physical activity. And after a while when the physical activities are quietened, the mind will have nothing to run behind and the mind will also quieten. And when that happens, when the mind sits quietly, it’s literally like you have some superpower that you are not using. It’s like you have this superpower that you have it, you own it, but you’re not using it because you are very judicious about how to use that superpower. You come to realize that my mind, even a single thought is a superpower. That for me is the gradual goal that we yogis need to, yoga seekers need to work upon. But starting small is a good idea. And I feel being quiet and happy with yourself is the greatest gift you can give yourself. It’s the highest act of self-love. I feel.

Amy:

I can’t help but think of the blessing it is to be old enough to remember what it’s like to stand in a line somewhere or see other people standing in a line somewhere and no one’s on phones. And it’s just like you just do not see that anymore. But something else that I was thinking is that even meditation has become something that quantify that, where we’ve got these apps and we put in how many hours or minutes we meditate and how long we’re sitting for and how many times a day. And it’s like this dopamine hit from that rather than establishing it as a way of life. And it’s kind of like going backtracking to the desire for knowledge and learning and study. It becomes addictive to feel like we’re giving ourself that sense of reward by acknowledging how many hours we’ve done this and that and it’s actually not getting us anywhere.

Prasad:

Yeah, this is the reality of modern spiritual seeker. The spirituality also has become a dopamine high, a dopamine excitation, spirituality, something that should be beyond the body mind complex has become just a spike in the mind and the brain. So we all, as a community, we all need to reflect deeply because there is a monetary backing for all these things. Nobody will make money by telling people, just be quiet and sit with yourself. No, you can’t make a business model out of sit with yourself. You have to make a business model. Sit with yourself with my mala! Something like that. Be quiet with my prism.

Amy:

Or with the music, with the meditation music…

Prasad:

With my music, yeah. Which is okay. I mean, I’m just making fun. But being out for shraddha and sharanagati, I would just say be very, very, very, very patient with yourself. That’s it. Extremely patient with yourself. Because what we truly are seeking as yoga seekers cannot be demonstrated on Instagram.

Amy:

Can’t be photographed.

Prasad, it’s always genuinely so enriching to hear you speak or to read your words online. And I really do cherish your thoughts and your teachings that you share. I really love listening to all the podcast interviews that you’ve done. They’re immensely informative and insightful. And for anyone who’s wanting to connect with Prasad, please head to his website, which is his name. So prasadrangnekar.com, which we will have linked up for you on the summit webpage, along with his incredible Instagram account. Please do go check that out. Thank you for being here and for tuning in. Don’t forget, you can also join us and upgrade to gain lifetime access to all the conversations here. And yes, of course, Prasad, thank you so much for your time, and certainly…

Prasad:

Thank you for having me.

Amy:

Yeah, my pleasure… your unrelenting commitment to sharing the essence of the yogic teachings and in turn, just thereby supporting the global yoga community so very much. Thank you.

Prasad:

Thank you so much. Thank you.