Inner Engineering: Experiencing A Wave of Bliss, Getting Initiated into the Shambhavi Mahamudra Kriya with Isha Yoga & Sadhguru
My experience with Inner Engineering program online with the phenomenal spiritual guru of modern times, Sadhguru.
It was the fall of 2017. I hadn't been much of a reader back then.
Yes, I had read a few pop-culture-influenced books like the Twilight Saga and the Fifty Shades Trilogy and the like. But had soon given up the practice to pursue a career solemnly. After all, I hadn't read anything worthwhile that enraptured me enough to consider reading as a serious pursuit of joy (or catharsis, practically speaking).
Sidenote: my obsession for reading began with reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time back in ‘19.
So, when I first noticed an open book laid flat upon the bed at an acquaintance's, the need to discover the title of the copy intrigued me. Instinctively, I picked it up, careful not to disturb the reader's idea of a bookmark. It had been the New York Times Bestseller Inner Engineering: A Yogi’s Guide to Joy by Sadhguru.
There is a technology for inner well-being—for creating a chemical basis for a blissful existence. This is one dimension of what I call “Inner Engineering.” If you are aware, you can activate your system in such a way that simply breathing is an enormous pleasure. All it takes is a willingness to pay a little attention to the inner mechanism.
- Sadhguru, Inner Engineering: A Yogi’s Guide to Joy.
My Spiritual Journey
Yoga, or enlightenment, or even the idea of a legitimate Guru that imparts wisdom and not corruption and utter blasphemy had been an absurd idea to me at the time. I was only seventeen and quite prejudiced (and in this domain, reasonably so). But I entertained the idea due to the fact that I highly admired that acquaintance of mine and his intellect and his complete disregard for nonsense. Surely, if this was all trash, he wouldn't be reading it, right?
I seared the page number of the one he’d been reading in my memory and turned to the first page with an excitement evidenced by that gleam in my eyes; ready to uncover another sacrilegious ideology strung up meticulously with calculated words. After all, that is how those charlatans become popular, right?
The preface called “The Four-Letter Word” starts with an anecdote (picture attached). To those who are familiar with Sadhguru and his discourses, that anecdote had been of the very popular character in his stories, Shankaran Pillai.
What first drew me in here had been Sadhguru’s signature dry wit that he expertly embedded with much wisdom. Never had I ever heard of a Dharma Guru (roughly translates to ’religious teacher’ in Hindi) to use such youthful language and a teaching infused with humor that could attract intellectuals and logicians alike with its rationally derived dogmas, so to speak, and not just pious dimwits blinded by religious doctrines.
The problem is that religious nuts around the world have exported everything that is beautiful about a human being to the other world. If you talk of love, they speak of divine love. If you talk of bliss, they speak of divine bliss. If you talk of peace, they speak of divine peace. We have forgotten that these are all human qualities. A human being is fully capable of joy, of love, of peace. Why do you want to export these to heaven?
- Sadhguru, Inner Engineering: A Yogi’s Guide to Joy.
By the end of that preface, Sadhguru managed to convince me that he was no Dharma Guru at all. That none of his teachings promoted religion (although the wisdom derives from several of them). He was not another gray-bearded man with a huge tika or tilak on his forehead, dressed in saffron from head to toe, claiming to know God (disclaimer: this is not throwing any shade to other Intelligent Gurus and wise Saints, just the fancy charlatans).
No, he is a visionary. A true mystic. And a Yogi (practitioner of Yoga).
An excerpt from the preface:
Self-transformation is not incremental self-improvement. Self-transformation is achieved not by morals or ethics or attitudinal or behavioral changes, but by experiencing the limitless nature of who we are. Self-transformation means nothing of the old remains. It is a dimensional shift in the way you perceive and experience life. Knowing this is yoga. One who embodies this is a yogi. One who guides you in this direction is a guru. My aim in this book is to help make joy your constant companion. To make that happen, this book offers you not a sermon, but a science; not a teaching, but a technology; not a precept, but a path. It is now time to start exploring that science, working the technology, walking the path.
- Sadhguru, Inner Engineering: A Yogi’s Guide to Joy.
Had I not been interrupted I am sure I would've gobbled down more chapters to satisfy my curious brain. So, the moment I got home that fine day, I convinced my parents to buy me the book.
I have never looked back ever since.
Why Sadhguru?
That is the story of how my journey to discovering the universe within began. (I thank my inquisitiveness!)
Soon I developed a taste for reading on all things Moksha (Hindi word for enlightenment) and Yoga (technically meaning ‘Union’, but here means physical and psychological practices traditionally written and carefully prescribed in the Hindu Scriptures of the Vedas).
But the one thing Sadhguru has always been insistent upon, is that there is a stark difference between knowledge and wisdom. Reading would do no good. It has to be absorbed experientially.
However, it is crucial to remember that this is no religious hogwash. In Sadhguru's own words:
The logical and experiential dimensions of life work in diametrically opposite ways. Logic is not without its uses, but these help only to handle the material aspects of life. If you handle your entire life with logic alone, you will end up a mess. … An intellectual understanding that is not backed by experiential knowledge can lead to mind games and deceptive states. But if oneness becomes an experiential reality, it will not produce an immature action. It will produce a tremendous experience of life that will leave you transformed forever.
- Sadhguru, Inner Engineering: A Yogi’s Guide to Joy.
Isha Foundation:
Isha Foundation, a spiritual non-profit organization founded and headed by Sadhguru, offers several teachings on Yoga and other spiritual practices at the Isha Yoga Centre, its headquarters amassing over a hundred acres outside of Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu in India.
Located on the foothills of the Velliangiri Mountains, this Ashram is mostly famed for two things:
A 112-foot tall Adiyogi Statue abutting the Ashram, formed using 20,000 individual iron plates weighing about 500 Tonnes. This statue of Adiyogi (the first Yogi) also holds a Guinness World Record for the largest bust sculpture in the world (picture above).
Its one-of-a-kind flagship course, delving into the mechanics of the human being, all mind, body and soul (and more), cleverly called ‘Inner Engineering’.
Having read the book, I had long since been wanting to enroll into the Inner Engineering program for that ‘hands-on’ experience of Yoga (union).
Credits to my dear friend, Amit, and his most generous mentor, Vaisakh Anna. Check out his YouTube channel here for more information on all things IE (Inner Engineering). Special credits to Dheeraj Anna, who oh-so-generously and most graciously sponsored it for me!
(Thank you for making this transcendental experience possible! I'm truly blessed!)
Shambhavi Mahamudra Kriya
I had the absolute pleasure of finishing the course and being initiated into the Shambhavi Mahamudra Kriya on a full moon! (If you know me well, you'd know how significant full moons are to me.)
To those unaware of the Shambhavi Mahamudra Kriya, this tool is the key teaching of the course that helps to truly experience life in its basest and most unfiltered form, in alignment with the universe.
The reason why most people are unhappy or unhealthy is that the physical, the mental and the “pranic” body are not in alignment. If they are properly aligned, a natural expression, an overwhelming expression of joyfulness will naturally happen within a human being. Now, we are looking at the technology of keeping these three bodies constantly aligned so that joyfulness is not an accidental happening; joyfulness becomes a normal condition, a natural way of living for you.
- Sadhguru on Benefits of Meditation blog post.
(disclaimer 2.0: please do not Google this tool and practice without being initiated into it by a learned Guru. Though the Kriya procedure sounds simple enough, it is imperative to receive the Kriya from the right source backed with proper training. This training involves being gently eased into the process with adequate guidance and required wisdom which can be transmitted to you only by a learned Guru.)
Here's what happened during my initiation of the Shambhavi Mahamudra Kriya:
I laughed. (My Guru has a humor, after all!)
I wept. (It's bound to get overwhelming when all that unrealized wisdom finally dawns upon you. Whether they were tears of joy or tears of sadness, I truly do not know!)
I learnt. (The invisible inner workings inside of a human being, of what essentially makes all life, all matter, everywhere: energy.)
I lived. (Yes. It might sound cliché. But for a moment there during my initiation, I experienced a dimension that very few humans have touched.)
But that's not all that happens when an individual goes through the initiation. Sadhguru's discourses along the way to help prep you up for the process impart wisdom with depth like no other.
If you go outward, it is an endless journey. If you turn inward, it is just one moment. In that one moment, everything changes. In that one moment, you are not in pursuit of joy anymore. Instead, your life becomes an expression of your joyfulness.
- Sadhguru, Inner Engineering: A Yogi’s Guide to Joy.
There has been a significant dimensional shift in my perspective of life.
How, you ask?
Here's how:
I have never felt the present moment as acutely as I do now. Actually, that sounds wrong. Let me rephrase:
I have never been so acutely aware of my being in the present moment as I do now.
My anger bouts have reduced so drastically since I stopped looking at who or what caused a certain misfortune/mishap and started simply accepting that this is it now. This has happened. This is the reality of my situation, regardless of how it came to be. Now it's simply my ‘responsibility’ to fix it.
My Key Takeaway
One of the key takeaways for me had been this: the future does not exist, but the past moment doesn't exist either!
It may seem confusing at first, but that is the truth. While its memory may still be stored in our mind, that moment, exactly the way it was and when it was, would never return. And while we may reminisce a past moment, we're never ‘living’ it. It's important to understand the distinction here. We are simply revisiting the memory through the neural pathways inside our brain, but we're still only in the present moment.
But what is memory? It is simply an imagination that once happened. And when I say imagination, I don't mean we conjured the event into our lives out of desire. No. Either it was thrown our way, as life often throws things at us, or we did conjure it into existence unconsciously due to our Karma.
If I promise to open a door for you tomorrow or I opened it for someone else yesterday, it is of no relevance. Only if I open a door for you today is it of some value.
- Sadhguru, Inner Engineering: A Yogi’s Guide to Joy.
Either way, we're still here and in the now, no matter how lost in thought we appear to be in that imagination/memory. The moment when a certain event happened or will happen, pleasant or unpleasant, doesn't even exist. Only 'now' does. That is why it's our time to act now. Because that is the only thing we can do.
And once we become fully aware of that, in every breath of our existence, we can finally learn to let go of the past and dissolve the Karma we built along the way; essentially ensuring our Karma doesn't get in the way of us ahead in our journey; also ensuring a certain clarity that helps move on from past wounds that never closed and past grudges we never let go of.
This here is merely a glimpse of what one can stand to achieve when committing to the Inner Engineering process through the Shambhavi Mahamudra Kriya.
Not only does this Kriya have psychological and Karmic benefits, but the physiological aspect of the Kriya helps us get rid of several mental afflictions such as unstable mind, distorted dreams or nightmares, stress, anxiety, while it also provides many physical benefits resulting in greater sleep quality and reduced need for rest, improved cardiac health, improved menstrual cycles and more!
Here's a list of benefits of the Shambhavi Mahamudra Kriya and why you should be initiated into it.
And while I could go on and on about the things I learnt, I believe that would entirely defeat the purpose of going through the course and rob you of so much more that my mere words would not help you ingrain and experience.
Here, I urge you on to take this course at your earliest capacity to reap the real benefits of what this life and the entire universe around us has to offer.
When it comes to external realities, each human being is differently capable. What one does, the other may not be able to do. But when it comes to inner realities, all of us are equally capable.
- Sadhguru, Inner Engineering: A Yogi’s Guide to Joy.
To know more about the Inner Engineering Program Online, click here. Or log onto isha.co/IE now.
Here, I take my leave. Leaving you with a song that although I do not understand (it is in Tamil, a South Indian language I do not speak), manages to splash my shores with its crest of a ‘Wave of Bliss’.
Love and light to you, my friend!
P. S. This post was by no means sponsored by the Isha Foundation or Sadhguru. All my opinions and experiences are my own. And I endorse this simply because I found it beneficial, and I want to!
P. P. S. Since this course had been sponsored for me through Amit, Vaisakh Anna and Dheeraj Anna during my time of need, with the only prerequisite that I finish the course, I strongly urge you that if you happened to reap any benefits and would also endorse this program, you sponsor it for anyone you know who might also need it!
It is my desire to do the same when I am able. This is my way of giving back.
Kindness and generosity out of no desire for recognition or anything in return is rarely found in this era. But the universe showed me that it does exist, especially when I believed it to be lost. Let us do our part in making this world a better place by helping those who need it, doing whatever we can that is within our capabilities!
P. P. P. S. All image credits go to the Isha Foundation and Sadhguru.