Question: I was raised as an atheist. Life would be so much easier if I had faith. In all my years of Yoga, I know I have heart, compassion and spirit, but I can’t connect with faith. Please offer me your guidance.
Swami Satchidananda: Whether you know it or not, you have faith. There is nobody in the world without faith. But faith is placed in different ways, at different times, by different people. First of all, we have faith in ourselves. You have faith you are living. You have faith in your mother’s word. Otherwise, you wouldn’t even know who your father is. Because who knows the real father? So whether we know it or not we all have faith. Faith is not something you have to put in God. As long as you have faith in something, it is enough. Faith works wonders. The Bible says that an ounce of faith can move mountains. We see that in our daily life. For example, somebody I knew had a serious problem with cancer. She just heard me saying, “Your body doesn’t have cancer” and she believed it, and now she has no more cancer. The doctors were trying hard to find the cancer, and no cancer was found in her body.  MORE

Some people think that monks have these esoteric practices and “What can we poor laypeople do?” But when you really understand what the monastic life is about, you realize that we are only doing—under more favorable circumstances and in an environment that generations have worked on to make more favorable—something that could be practiced anywhere. I’m not talking about long hours of prayer, long hours of meditation, spiritual reading or studying, or anything like that, because the essence of monastic life does not consist in any of those. Those are all means to an end. The end—in all of the monastic traditions, of both East and West—consists in cultivating mindfulness, being mindful. And “mindful” may be a little misleading, because it sounds a bit much like mind-over-body, but it has nothing to do with mind over or against body. I think “wholeheartedness” is the English word that expresses better what mindfulness as a technical term means; that you respond to every situation from your center, from your heart and that you listen with your heart to every situation, and your heart elicits the response.  MORE

I started Yoga, fairly green, at the age of 19. I was not at all athletic or even interested in exercise before. Nor did I take interest in Yoga the first few times it surfaced in my life. In college, I took one class to satisfy a physical education credit, but I didn’t really want to be there, or in the gym at all, and then my sisters took up hot yoga which I always thought sounded awfully tortuous! My interest grew when I fell in love with someone who wanted to try Yoga. I stepped into a studio to learn with the intentions of sharing the practice with that person. Ambitiously, I jumped right into level two classes (the highest level at the studio) without taking a beginner’s class. I relied on watching the teacher and fellow students, slowly learning through repetition and observation. Six months into this new practice, I remember thinking to myself, “I really like this. I am going to become a teacher.” And so I enrolled in the studio’s 200-hour teacher training. A 200-hour training is the foundational training for any Yoga teacher to become certified through the Yoga Alliance®....The time flew by, and to my surprise, I was invited to start teaching directly after the conclusion of this training.  MORE

Yogaville had an unusual visitor a few weeks ago: A stately blue heron arrived and stood watchfully along one of the banks of the Lotus Lake.  (Photo by Bill Geoghean)