Blog – Page 33 – Integral Yoga San Francisco

Personal Reflections on an Integral Yoga Ordination

by Rev. Sadasiva (Kurt) Schroeder

Last weekend I was ordained as an Integral Yoga Minister in San Francisco, culminating a process that began twenty five years ago when I was introduced to Integral Yoga by my then partner. Jai was looking for opportunities to teach in a spiritual and health-related area at a time when the gay community in San Francisco was responding to the HIV/AIDS crisis, a crisis that was to become a pandemic among the most vulnerable and marginalized segments of our society and the world.

In the spring of 2020, when the news about COVID emerged, I was struck by how similar the understandable fear and sense of urgency was to what had arisen in the days of the AIDS pandemic. Integral Yoga, as a system of attaining optimal health, with its emphasis on maintaining peace of mind, is as relevant today as it was then and has been throughout the ages. I am proud to be part of this beautiful lineage that offers an effective and sensible approach to reaching our highest potential for the greatest benefit of all.

The ordination ceremony began with a Puja to the Light and was attended by a small group (for safety’s sake) of sangha members and friends, many of whom were gathering at the SFIYI for the first time in a long time. There was a general feeling that the ominous COVID cloud was lifting, thanks to an effective vaccine and having closely followed precautions. Swami Ramananda officiated at a beautiful ceremony that included explanations of the significance of the different aspects of the Puja, for those who might be unfamiliar with it. Swami Vimalananda and Reverend Kamala Damaris both spoke about the significance and experience of being a minister. The minister’s vow and certificate were presented and signed.

It all seemed to be going by so quickly and as though I was watching it from a distance. Then, I was given the opportunity to say a few words and suddenly, to my surprise, my heart burst open. As I gazed at the people there and saw the light reflected in their eyes, I felt and watched myself melt away in a moment of pure love and connection.

In the moments that followed I spoke about how, early on in my journey, I had heard Gurudev’s message that ambition and success could be measured by the effort made to maintain one’s peace of mind. Until then, I had taken ambition and success to mean following steps to secure material wealth in a competitive system that rewarded individual accomplishments. I began, instead, to use my state of mind as a barometer to guide me. If my peace of mind was disturbed, that was a signal to examine my own motives and focus instead on understanding what others needed. Gurudev’s words motivated me and gave me permission to travel down the spiritual path. I understood that the greatest ambition one could have was to cultivate and maintain that peace of mind. That made sense to me and made me a better person overall. Imagine how thrilled I was later when I heard Gurudev state, with such strength and conviction, that “Peace is my God!” This was something that I, with a secular background, could completely understand and get behind.

I took a break during my Integral Yoga seminarian training to earn a Master of Divinity degree at Naropa University, in order to become a hospital chaplain. I felt that this Buddhist based university was a good complement to what I had learned and experienced through Integral Yoga. This academic and contemplative journey confirmed and deepened what I had already learned. It struck me that it all boiled down to being kind; kind to myself, to others, and to all of creation. I understood more deeply that this guiding intention of kindness was the best way to maintain my peace of mind. It has become my goal in life.

To me, becoming an Integral Yoga Minister means having an intention to continue along the spiritual path with a commitment to Integral Yoga and the teachings and practices given to us by Gurudev. My plan now is to return to Boulder where I have lived the past nine years, and explore hospice chaplaincy. I aspire to continue digging a deep well, a well that holds the promise of peace and harmony for humanity, the planet, and beyond.

Om Shanthi, Shanthi, Shanthi.

Sadasiva Kurt Schroeder, E-RYT500, got involved in Yoga in the mid-1990’s and began his training at the San Francisco Integral Yoga Institute. He has led beginning and intermediate level teacher trainings, both in San Francisco and Yogaville. Sadasiva completed his Master of Divinity studies at the Naropa Institute. He was ordained as an Integral Yoga minister in the Fall of 2021, shortly after completing a program in professional chaplaincy residency and a fellowship in palliative care. He now lives in Boulder, CO, where he works as a chaplain.

prajna2021-10-13T15:16:35-07:00October 13th, 2021|

Forgiveness – Freeing the Heart from the Past

by Swami Ramananda

For the last few years, some of us at the Institute here in San Francisco have been grappling with how to respond to the many crises we see worsening in our world. It seems clear that to make any substantial changes, we need to rise above the many ways we have divided ourselves to address these problems together. A very real obstacle to working together is the tendency to harbor ill-will or long term grudges towards those that have harmed us. Toward this end, we decided to practice forgiveness for the month of October.

Forgiveness can be a very difficult process, but it can also be very healing. If we have been deeply hurt, we may have no interest in forgiving or it may seem impossible. But an inability to forgive usually means carrying inside a psychic knot of anger and ill-will that darkens the heart and keeps us connected to the very person from whom we may wish to be free.

Correctly understood, forgiveness is a conscious process of releasing resentful feelings. It frees us from being emotional victims of others, allows our hearts to breathe, and moves us one step closer to experiencing the natural flow of compassion that arises when blockages are removed.

Forgiveness does not mean condoning someone’s behavior, allowing them to be irresponsible or abusive, or letting them back into our lives. It does not mean being nice to the person you forgive–or even talking to them. Because it’s primarily an inner process, we can practice forgiveness and still take appropriate action to correct someone, set boundaries to protect ourselves, or even press charges.

A significant obstacle to forgiveness is the presence of anger, rage, grief or fear that may prevent us from acting skillfully. We may be more comfortable directing our fury toward someone than facing those painful feelings within ourselves. Inflicting suffering on others may feel good or justifiable temporarily, but it won’t heal our wounds or offer real peace to our hearts.

Resolving painful emotions requires that we acknowledge them without shame or self-judgement. Emotions are meant to move through us. In order to feel safe enough to experience them, we may need support, particularly if our own mindfulness is not strong enough to be fully present to our pain without getting lost in it. As we untie these emotional knots, we recover our perspective and clarity, and often see the hard lessons that our suffering has taught us.

This effort to reflect on and release painful feelings lays a foundation for the process of forgiveness. As we learn to face our own impulses and reactions, it becomes easier to understand the actions of others. Forgiveness then becomes a practice of looking beneath the surface of a person’s behavior to acknowledge the deeper spiritual essence that is worthy of our respect.

Looking deeply, we may recognize that many of our interactions with each other are unconsciously based on protecting our self-image, trying to control the ever-changing world around us and win the acceptance of others. We can practice having compassion for the ways that we all suffer from our attempts to arrange for happiness, reminding ourselves of the innate goodness within, like the light beneath a lampshade. We can also acknowledge the ways we may have hurt others when we’ve been preoccupied with our own safety and desires, and in this spirit of compassion, forgive ourselves for these mistakes.

Forgiving ourselves is a significant step toward understanding the actions of others that have hurt us. We can practice looking with eyes of compassion and releasing bitterness from our hearts, seeing both someone’s behavior and their deeper spiritual Self. It may help to envision such person as a child, full of hopes and dreams and shaped by the various traumas of human life.

Forgiveness might become easier when we understand that those who made us suffer are no doubt suffering themselves. And we may need to practice numerous times breathing into our hearts, letting go of our anger and trusting that their own suffering will bring them the lessons they need to heal and be whole.

As we make this effort to forgive, we move from responding to another person’s ego-identity to acknowledging their true nature. We begin to erode the confines of our own ego and release the armor around our hearts, accepting ourselves and others as we are. We begin to experience a deeper source of happiness—one that comes from knowing our connection with all of life–and to feel the natural impulse to love and give that engenders a profound peace.

Swami Ramananda is the Executive Director of the Integral Yoga Institute in San Francisco and a greatly respected senior teacher in the Integral Yoga tradition, who has been practicing Yoga for over 45 years. Ramananda offers practical methods of integrating the timeless teachings and practices of Yoga into daily life, and transforming the painful aspects of human experience into steps toward realizing one’s full potential.

He leads beginner, intermediate and advanced level Yoga teacher training programs in San Francisco, and offers a variety of programs in many locations in the U.S., Europe and South America. Ramananda co-developed the Stress Management Teacher Training program with Swami Vidyananda, has trained many teachers to bring Yoga into corporate, hospital and medical settings, and has taught mind/body wellness programs in many locations. He is a certified Yoga therapist and founding board member of the Yoga Alliance, a national registry that supports and promotes yoga teachers as professionals. He is a co-founder of The Spiritual Action Initiative (SAI) which brings together individuals committed to working for social justice for all beings and for the care and healing of our natural world. His warmth, wisdom and sense of humor have endeared him to many.

prajna2021-10-01T10:42:12-07:00October 1st, 2021|Tags: Swami Ramananda, teaching of the month|

Love Letter

by Diana Meltsner

Every moment there is a love letter sent by the wind or the rain or even the rays of the light, like birds singing at the sunrise for all to hear. Somewhere on the planet there is a sunrise happening right now and the birds are singing to welcome it. Every moment, right now there is a soul sending out Love and Peace through chanting, prayer or wordless expressions of the heart. When the heart is singing, it awakens from its slumber and the beauty around us becomes truly visible.

We can align ourselves to hear this song, to receive this love letter. We also have the choice to let go of what feels important for a moment and join in the singing. We can send our own love letter out into the collective consciousness to reach each other right now and across the timelines.

Can I add to this love letter? Can you?

Some days are hard and I lean on my practice and faith. Everything seems dark, and I want to hide from the world. I don’t want others to see me or feel my presence. I get surprised by the kindness of people around me, which I hardly seem to deserve. In those times, recalling that Love and Light are an option for me is something to cherish. I only need to remember to enter the quietness and stillness just enough to receive and welcome this Blessing sent out by many. I only need to admit to myself that we all need a little help from time to time.

And there are those times I feel open and consciously connected, the times when the flow of the world seems unconstricted by the whims of my existence. Those are the times I can give back. It can actually feel quite ordinary being in the moment and easy to forget that I also can add to this love letter. Yes, my mind reflects a glimmer of beauty and I can share it. In these times, I have to remember, it matters that I care and I can add my own expression of kindness.

We can all make a difference even if we just whisper a few words of loving kindness and doing so keeps the heart happy and alive.

Giving and receiving, inhaling and exhaling, like a bird moving the wings up and down to stay afloat, there has to be balance. Do I give back enough in comparison to what I receive?

May the Light of Truth overcome all darkness.

May we seek this Light and share it with one another.

ॐ

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty

and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study

and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

-Rumi

Diana Meltsner, C-IAYT and e-RYT500, has been teaching yoga in the Bay Area since 2001. The classes she teaches include prenatal, gentle, various levels of Hatha yoga, and yoga workshops. Diana is a lead teacher trainer for 200-hour Basic Yoga Teacher Trainings at Integral Yoga Institute San Francisco. She is certified yoga therapist and offers individual therapeutic sessions with focus ranging from stress reduction to injury recovery. Her classes include physical postures, breathing, guided relaxation, meditation and other yoga teachings which help people to find deeper sense of well-being and ability to move through life with increased ease, intuition, and stress resilience. www.dianameltsner.com

Join Diana online this Sun. October 3 @ 10:00 am – 12:00 pm PDT for her Back Care Workshop.
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Sevika Ford2021-09-29T15:21:26-07:00September 27th, 2021|

It Should Have Been Otherwise: The Delusion of Should

by Swami Vimalananda

“It’s unfair!!!” “That’s not the way it should be.” We are completely attached to “should.”

How many times have we thought that our fathers or mothers should have treated us better? How much pain do we experience, no matter how old we are, feeling not looked after the way we felt we needed? Our employers, partners, relatives, neighbors, politicians, even strangers should be acting according to how we envision the world, the way it should be.

One of my aunts disinherited her son, an only child, because my aunt felt that her son expected too much of her. She thought he expected her to always be available to take care of his children, be generous financially and always be open to their visits. When she died my cousin was devastated when the will was read. He still lives his life with anger and grief over his mother’s action.

I always had resentment towards my father for being aloof and spending most of the time in the garage when he wasn’t working at his job. Many times for me to ask him something I would go to the garage, bend down so I could see him under a car or I would find him under a hood. Sometimes he would ask me to get him a certain wrench or some other tool as he continued to work so our conversation would intermittently be interspersed with, “Please hand me a 3/4 inch wrench.”

I spent every summer with my father in Los Angeles, and one summer I was returning home to my mother. I got off the bus in San Francisco, and no one was there to greet me. I waited around, then phoned many times, and no one answered. I finally took a streetcar and when I got home, a friend was there and said he slept through the phone calls. It happened that my mother received an invitation to go away for the weekend so she took it and asked our friend to pick me up. I completely felt she should have been there; even after all these years I still can feel in my weaker moments that if she loved me, she would have been there.

My sister gave birth to her son in Fort Riley, Kansas, where her husband was stationed in the army. My mother didn’t go to the birth, nor right after to take care of my sister. I held a resentment for many years, convinced my sister needed her and my mother didn’t go to help. I was visiting my sister many years later and remembering my feelings, I told her how I resented our mother for not looking after her. There was a long silence, then my sister told me she didn’t want our mother to come, she wouldn’t know what to do with her if she did come, and she had plenty of help from fellow soldiers’ wives. I must have carried that resentment for forty years. I had an attachment to how I thought it should be and how I thought it should be different.

And marriage was one of my biggest “shoulds.” When we first fall in love, there are no boundaries to our love. The love of my life, we loved each other unconditionally. I remember very clearly that I thought my husband possessed everything I ever needed. As time went on and I didn’t receive what I thought should have been a fountain of unconditional love with great affection, I said to him, “I feel I am starving in the land of abundance.” It didn’t occur to me that it was not there to give, nor that maybe I was complete without needing his continuous affection. That my dependency was actually making him feel the need to close off, trying to take more than he had to give.

Of course we also feel we should take better care of ourselves, be kinder, be a better citizen, react differently than we did to some situations, be more mature, smarter, socially gifted, and never angry.

It creates feelings of inferiority, sadness, loneliness, anger, resentment, and more but the major problem is the feeling of powerlessness— being a victim. It is like looking out through blinders and as Sri Gurudev would say, “with a jaundiced eye everything looks yellow until we cure the ailment.”

Judging others as a measurement of our own feelings of inferiority: I’m better than he is, or less than. Every interaction can be viewed from this stance, everything from daily interactions, to anyone being “different.” It takes the form of elitism, racism, sexism, in fact all prejudices. And as I like to say, throwing out the baby and keeping the bath water, not knowing what really is — judging everything from a jaundiced eye.

I can say looking back, after many years, I truly know the man that was my husband and who I thought he was, were two separate people. My delusion based on my desires completely blinded me. I felt I could only be complete if he loved me in the manner that I thought he should. It didn’t occur to me that I embodied completeness and that I am free—free from needing other people’s approval and love, in all shapes and sizes, for I embody love. With this understanding I can accept him and everyone just the way they are.

I remember when my youngest daughter and I were in line at her elementary school to buy ice cream and a boy cut in line ahead of us, I immediately was going to tell him to get in the back of the line, but my daughter looked at me and said, “Mom, I really don’t care if he got ahead of us.” I really saw at that moment my daughter had it more together than I did.

Being free means not needing to see the world in a certain way, dependent on it to respond in a way that we need for our feelings of security; it’s the ability to see the world separate from personal desires. I don’t need a set of opinions to protect me which is just a way to feel secure in the world. It can be seeing the world through a non-biased lens. Sri Gurudev said that his favorite newscaster’s closing was, “And that’s the way it is….” Our security and selfhood are not contingent on the outside world. Then as Fred Rogers stated, “I love you just the way you are.” True love and selfish desires are incompatible. Loving without expectations is love; everything else, Sri Gurudev stated, is “business.”

The only way to love without expectations is to know that we are already complete, and we can touch the source and live in the source of true love. It is available to us but only with the ability to calm our minds, and not get caught up in our thoughts and all our expectations and desires. As is stated in The Yoga Sutras of Sri Patanjali, we must practice stilling the mind for a long time, without break and in all earnestness. We have to put in the effort. Then as we develop discriminative discernment we can let go of our attachments, knowing that they are really just delusions. Instead, the way to happiness is acknowledging that desires and attachments are really hindrances. The path to love and completeness is clear and straightforward, we just have to put in the work.

The Mind Of Absolute Trust
by Seng-Ts’an

The Great Way isn’t difficult
for those who are unattached to their preferences.
Let go of longing and aversion,
and everything will be perfectly clear.
When you cling to a hairbreadth of distinction,
heaven and earth are set apart.
If you want to realize the truth,
don’t be for or against.
The struggle between good and evil
is the primal disease of the mind.
Not grasping the deeper meaning,
you just trouble your mind’s serenity
and as vast as infinite space,
it is perfect and lacks nothing.
But because you select and reject,
you can’t perceive its true nature.
Don’t get entangled in the world,
don’t lose yourself to emptiness.
Be at peace in the oneness of things,
and all errors will disappear by themselves.

If you don’t live in the Tao,
you fall into assertion or denial.
Asserting that the world is real,
you are blind to its deeper reality:
denying that the world is real,
you are blind to the selflessness of all things.
The more you think about these matters,
the farther you are from the truth.
Step aside from all thinking,
and there is nowhere you can’t go.
Returning to the root, you find the meaning;
chasing appearances, you lose their source.
At the moment of profound insight,
you transcend both appearance and emptiness.
Don’t keep searching for the truth;
just let go of your opinions.

Swami Vimalananda Ma, RYT500, is an Integral Yoga sannyasi – monk. She has been involved with Integral Yoga since 1971 and Director of the San Francisco Integral Yoga Institute from 1992-2011. She specializes in teaching yoga philosophy and spiritual counseling.