Spiritual and Religious Struggle: My Encounter with Yoga
From early age, I had a precautious spiritual yearning. Raised as a Catholic and living in Venezuela, a country where most of the population was Catholic at that time and most the social and political values were intertwined with this religion, I did not have the opportunity of exposure of the awakening of the Eastern practices that were influencing people of the Western world on the early 1970’s .
My interior dissatisfaction with the idea ingrained by family and teachers that God was far away and that I have to earn merit in order to gain the love of God was crucial in my life because I did not have that experience. In spite of this, the inculturation that I received was extremely conservative. Looking for ways to quench my searching, to learn how to develop my interior life, drove me to belong to a very conservative Catholic group, the Opus Dei. After only few years, I figured out that this was not my way.
I turned away from my roots with distress for several years until I felt totally lost. It took me a lot of courage to confront this situation. Very slowly I began to hear my internal voice guiding me to new territories and using my Christian roots as solid base. My life began to return more to balance. I was able to finish my studies, begin my professional life as biochemist and form a family.
My life was disrupted in the middle 1990’s when my husband accepted an international job in Europe. My children were 3 and 4 and half years at that time. The experience was very stressful because our stay was only for a year and a half.
Suddenly, my husband received a new position at the headquarters of a company in Cleveland, Ohio. It took us several years to adapt to the different culture, language, climate, social and religious values, diversity of people in the United States. When we were able to settle down, we realized that my husband’s new job responsibilities required a lot of traveling and my desire to work outside home began to dim with time. We considered all the pros and cons for the psychological stability of the kids. I decided to take care of the family first by being a stay home-mother. It was extremely hard for me to adapt to this new situation after all the effort invested in the development of my professional life.
My integration to American life was complicated and lengthy. The school system of my children was the first support system I had, so I began to work there as a volunteer. Then, I realized that my faith was the only thing stable, so I began participating in the catholic parish life near my home. There I experienced an extraordinary support that helped with my social integration.
My life became more anchored, and I began feeling satisfaction with all my activities in home as well as my new interests such as photography and graphic design and the different volunteer opportunities that I was able to find. When I started having more time for myself, I began to have my second spiritual call. At this moment, I felt like everything in my traditional prayer life was dry and rotten. My form of prayer shifted and intuitively I began using short passages of scripture readings in order to promote union with God. Little by little, I was drawn to silence and solitude at the end of my readings. Several years of daily practice gave me the strength to open myself to new experiences.
With the necessity for community, I began searching for a prayer group. First, I found a Women’s Prayer group that helped me to understand and learn how to behave in this context. I was exposed to new devotional practices and began to be exposed to the Christian Contemplative Heritage that was lost for centuries and was preserved in very few monastic congregations around the world. I found a group practicing Centering Prayer, a Christian meditation practice that permits the development of Contemplative Prayer. After a few encounters with this group, I realized that these people were doing the same thing that I was doing in home. My interest in knowing more about this form of prayer led me to find the Christian origins, receive direct training and getting the possibility of becoming involved in the organization Contemplative Outreach, which was spreading this practice in the Christian international community. I was fortunate to meet Fr. Thomas Keating and Fr. William Meninger, Cistercians monks who were two of the three people who developed the method of Centering Prayer and began to teach it to lay people.
After a few years of practicing this kind of silent meditation of 20 minutes, 2 times per day with the simple intention to consent to God’s presence and action within, I began to experience positive changes in my behavior such as more peace, being more conscious of my own thoughts patterns, learning how to disengage or let go of thoughts, and developing the ability to witness experiences. I experienced a surge of energy related to my daily practice that I was able to channel to my volunteer work.
A health crisis in my life directed me to yoga as a therapeutic tool and the results were extraordinary. I began to enquire more deeply, and I found out that yoga is a way of life for a spiritual development to attain union with the Higher Self. My readings on the topic of yoga turned out to be an overwhelming task. So instead, I decided to take some yoga classes and find a teacher to help me to get a general background. After few classes, I was very disappointed to find out that the classes were more physically oriented. Talking with several teachers about my interest of finding a true yoga class, I was directed to the ATMA center in Cleveland Ohio where Satyananda Yoga classes were taught.
My exposure to the Satyananda tradition began at this point and my interest became apparent when I found a connection of this type of yoga practice to my spiritual life. Little by little, I began to discover my body and learned to acknowledge its presence with all the defects and pleasantness, began to be aware of its different dimensions and began to have the impression that many of the practices that I was learning in my yoga classes were leading me to silence and stillness in the same way as of my Christian meditation. This practical knowledge unfolded a deep personal questioning about the role of religion, the Centering Prayer practice as a meditation tool and my yoga Satyananda initiation. At the beginning, I felt confused and agitated, for my lack of background; however, I received trustworthy support from my teachers and felt the conviction that “Everything will be OK”.
During the same time of my yoga initiation, I was leading the Contemplative Outreach chapter in Cleveland, Ohio. I started working as a volunteer in this network in 2006. This experience helped me to learn about the origins of the Christian Contemplative movement and exposed me to different Christian denominations. I became more aware of the influence of Eastern religions on the West and the introduction of meditations practices and observe the extraordinary interest of many people about inter-religious dialog.
At the time of my deep questioning I did not hesitate to search for more detail. I discovered that the founder of the World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM) Fr. John Main, O.S.B. met Swami Satyananda in Kuala Lumpur when he was working as a lawyer in 1955-1956 where Swami Satyananda taught him how to meditate. When Fr Main decided to enter to the Benedictine monastery years later, Fr Main was not allowed to continue this kind of meditation. However, after several years in the monastery he dedicated time to study the Catholic mystics and found enough support to re-initiate his former form of prayer/meditation. At this point, he began forming groups to spread this form of meditation practice. Two decades later, John Main explained the following concerning his teacher, “For the swami, the aim of meditation was the coming to awareness of the Spirit of the universe who dwells in our hearts.” He recited these verses from the Upanishads: "He contains all things, all works and desires and all perfumes and tastes. And he enfolds the whole universe and, in silence, is loving to all. This is the Spirit that is in my heart. This is Brahman." Christian Meditation p.11 (published by the Benedictine Priory of Montreal,1977)
When I found out the information that Swami Satyananda’s goal of meditation coincides with the Christian concept of the aim of contemplative prayer as conscious union with the Indwelling Spirit of God, I was reassured that yoga was not about religion and my exposure to this tradition will help me to understand my spiritual experiences that I have had during the years. At this moment, I embarked in the understanding of yoga as tool for transformation.
After 6 years of exposure to the Satyananda Yoga tradition, the formal course work for Yoga Studies and Teacher Training 1 and 2 gave me the grounded knowledge to understand that yoga is not a religion. Yoga is a very sophisticated science that offer different ways to help people in the quest of who they really are.
Blog by Josefina Fernandez