How to keep calm by the superguru the A-list love
He taught Ozzy Osbourne to meditate, and counts Donna Karan and Stevie Wonder among his 600 million fans. In an uproariously funny encounter, RACHEL JOHNSON channels her inner yogi...
EN rouTE to Surrey’s Virginia Water, on my private pilgrimage to see one of the world’s most famous gurus, kitemarked and certified by notables including designer Donna Karan, and singers Moby, Stevie Wonder and ozzy osbourne, I make notes.
What do I want my hour with the most watched mystic, yogi and visionary in the history of YouTube — whose book Inner Engineering, A Yogi’s Guide To Joy hit the New York Times bestseller list on release — to achieve?
What would he do for me? I made a note of his to-do list in the taxi. ‘Addicted to screens, coffee, alcohol. Play too much tennis so have stiff joints. Wake at 4am with The Fear. Attention span of gnat. Need my whole life to be more yoga . ’ Basically, could he Marie Kondo my head?
We drive past lush, prinked, gated estates sitting on emerald lawns, and arrive at a closed gate with a security guard in a hut just inside. He checks my name off a list and lets us in. I feel like a fan going to visit a Beatle in their heyday. I’m sure at least one of the Fab Four lived in a rock star spread just like this in
I’ll allow myself to be flawed. The illusion of perfection is an illusion anyway ACTRESS AMY ADAMS
Virginia Water. Inside, on instruction, I remove my shoes and pad into a vast living room, with a fake fire blazing at one end, low sofas and glass windows giving out to the extensive, tree-shaded grounds.
There is a TV crew, the photographer, a PA with a clipboard. But in the middle of the melee, a mystic straight out of central casting is sitting cross-legged on a pouffe: beard (check), turban (check), bare feet ( check). His merry expression makes me feel as if the man — Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev but known to his hundreds of millions of followers only as Sadhguru — has already read my soul and found it gently amusing.
We sit side by side and it becomes clear that he is not going to give me a meditation class, teach me how to breathe myself happy or show me his asanas, even. There are no quick fixes, folks. Instead, he is going to do something more profound: he is going to explain his philosophy so that I can heal from within using his own ‘inner engineering’ methods, until ‘every cell in my body is bouncing with joy’.
To him, meditation and yoga are not a practice, an act; they are a state of mind, a quality, that flow from unconstipating your consciousness (his words) and eliminating the boundaries between what you feel is ‘ you’ and the universe, so that you experience you, other people and the world around you as yourself. GOT
that? Take a deep breath, assume the lotus position and prepare to make your inner being ‘a chemistry of blissfulness’.
Sadhguru speaks not in sentences, not in paragraphs, but in entire TeD talks (he has done many of these video lectures, with millions of views), so I will have to crunch down what he told me.
I will precis his words, which come in an ever-rolling stream, interspersed with explosive chuckles.
essentially, the 61-year-old mystic who loves motorbikes and who spent his youth bringing yoga to the masses, says this: we all have the same amount of time on this earth. ‘Time is rolling away for all of us at the same pace,’ Sadhguru tells me. (I later discover we share the same birthday).
‘People are desperately trying to stretch the time. But if you live very long you live many years of inefficiency and back-to- diapers type of life [chuckle], so the best thing is to manage the energy, not to try to manage the time,’ he explains. ‘You can’t hold time back, nor can you store it, save it, or accumulate it.’
I ponder this. Could Sadhguru be saying that, after all these years, time isn’t money after all?
‘But if you manage your energy well, what someone does in ten years you can do in one year.’
OK, I hear you say. Ask the bearded one how you can manage your energy well. Quick!
This is where his ‘ inner engineering’ concept of the yogic system comes in.
‘Just as we engineer the external world, there is a science and technology to inner management as well,’ he says, fixing me with his brown eyes and sitting very still.
‘It’s unfortunate today that our education systems haven’t paid any attention to this kind of management. We are only telling our children how to control the world, how to enhance what’s around us. But how to enhance this life has not been touched on at all.’ I wait expectantly. ‘The entire concept of yoga in the West is about twisting and turning and getting into impossible postures — you must look like a leftover noodle. That’s what people think is yoga.
‘Only one sutra is about physical postures, but that has come to mean everything about yoga in the West. The word yoga means this.’
I hold my breath. Then I remember to breathe. Here it comes.
‘If you consciously obliterate the boundaries of your individuality, you’re in yoga!
‘Yoga means you sit here, are the existence, you are the universe. It’s a different experience of life.
‘To come to this, you have to address your body, your mind, your emotions, your energy. After all, what are your body and your mind? They are just accumulations of memory you have gathered, food you have eaten.’
He goes on. ‘Why is this important? Most people’s experience of life, it is “me versus the universe”. This is the reason there is so much fear, anxiety, depression. If you are in competition with existence, you are bound to be depressed!’ One of his happy chuckles follows.
Sadhguru is the least depressed man I have ever met, and it all started because one day, at 25, he went to sit on a hill outside Mysore, the southern Indian town where he lived.
As he sat there with his eyes open he became the air, he became the rock, he became the atmosphere. And it felt like 15 minutes,, but was, in fact, four hours.
When he realised what had happened he was ‘ drenched with blissfulness’ and every cell in his body was ‘exploding with ecstasy’ because he was at one with his universe. And that was the secret to life.
ever since then, he says, he’s been stoned.
‘look into my eyes,’ he commands. I do, and I see his pupils have shrunk to dots, like someone on drugs. ‘I am stoned all the time, not from taking anything. I can show you millions of people who have tears of ecstasy like me.’
If you want to be like Sadhguru, you have to learn how to harness
your intelligence, so it doesn’t turn against you. Also, learn how to adapt to triumph and disaster (Kipling’s twin imposters) with equal composure.
Life will throw curveballs at you, but it’s how you respond to these situations that marks you out. You can choose, in fact, between ‘enlightenment’ or ‘madness’.
‘so the only question is, are you a good manager or a bad manager?’
Rather than allow the two unique human faculties — memory and imagination — to run your life, you control them instead. EssentIALLY,
he argues, the more we can merge with others and our universe, the happier we will be.
‘At the moment most people are not using their body and mind for their well-being; their body and mind are using them.
‘too many people are prisoners of their own minds. this is because your intelligence has turned against you,’ he says.
‘Creation gave you the most sophisticated system on the planet, but you don’t even bother to read the users’ manual!’ Where is it, I cry — as if Life, the User’s Manual is lying somewhere around the house.
‘of course, this is why I am here, [chuckle],’ he replies. ‘If your car is broken, do you go to the manufacturer to fix it or the local tinker?’ It’s a good line. only I can help you to help yourself, he is telling me.
If you want more of this, you are not alone. sadhguru has brought his Isha yoga empire to hundreds of thousands of Indian schoolchildren and to life-term prisoners in tamil nadu. he has held mass yoga sessions, built centres for spiritual growth in Asia and the U.s., and is a regular at the World economic Forum in Davos. It’s estimated 600 million people have attended his programmes.
this month he is coming to London and all this ecstasy, joy and ‘pleasantness’ (one of his favourite words) can be yours, too, for a substantial investment of your time (and money, of course). All it takes is 28 hours of ‘focused time’ and you can improve your concentration, mental clarity, emotional balance, energy levels, productivity, inner peace and self-confidence.
‘Do you need your followers to give up red meat, coffee, alcohol, etc.?’ I ask. ‘I make no rules!’ he exclaims. ‘If your life is not worthwhile enough that you can’t invest 28 hours on your own well-being, then you deserve to go through all this stuff!’ he chuckles. So
thAt’s it. We don’t know we can control the situation, but with Isha Yoga we can definitely control how we conduct ourselves when it happens.
so when I wake up at 4am and I have the fear that all the people I love are going to die, my children will never be able to buy houses, and I’m going to get old and I won’t have any work, I now understand this.
I am not suffering life. With practice, we can all handle life. What I am suffering is memory and imagination — both the curse and the blessing of our unique human consciousness.
Knowing that, I can choose a different path.
his PA approaches with a clipboard. time’s up. he gives me a warm hug, rips off his turban and traditional Indian clothes, jumps into a black tracksuit for travelling and dashes to catch a flight to LA (of course) and his disciples on the West Coast.
heaven can’t wait, not even for sadhguru.
Inner engineering Completion with Sadhguru, April 20-21, at London exCel (tickets from £370, sadhguruinlondon.com).
‘The entire concept of yoga in the West is about getting into impossible postures — you must look like a leftover noodle’