Julie: Without intending to do so, it seems you were one of the early yoga therapists in this country.
Nischala: When I started using yoga as therapy at our ashram in Connecticut, we had one of the first holistic clinics, I didn’t have a title. We didn’t call ourselves yoga therapists in those days. I just taught yoga to the patients with amazing results. Later I worked with Dean Ornish, MD, in the Lifestyle Heart Trial and Michael Lerner from the Commonweal Cancer Program. I had no idea it would make an impact on society as it has.
Julie: How important is research on yoga?
Nischala: We live in a Western country that believes in research. I don’t think the research makes a difference in how people are affected. That’s what we need to do to satisfy the mind.
There was a story recently by a physician who writes regularly for the San Francisco Chronicle. He was asked about acupuncture, and he went to China and had them show him the different ways they use acupuncture. He writes about observing an open-heart surgery on a woman with three needles in her ear as the anesthesia. That was all, just three needles. He was astounded by it; he took pictures and everything. Afterwards he said to the physicians, “I’d love to see your research on this.” And they burst out laughing. “Only Americans want to see this.”
But the need to prove the efficacy of yoga is growing. People in the United States like to see studies.
Julie: Including people in the medical profession.
Nischala: And patients. When you take a drug you want to see a clinical trial proving it works. To me, yoga’s been around for five thousand years. Doesn’t that mean it helps? I honor both sides. My only concern is that people will forget that yoga is a wisdom tradition and take it only as a medical treatment plan.
We chose to do a clinical trial on heart disease so people could know the great benefits of yoga. When it was unequivocally proven, it made an impression on people.
Julie: What did you do in the Heart Study?
Nischala: We treated the whole person, and their hearts got better. I didn’t do anything specifically for their hearts, except maybe a little imagery. But basically the asanas that were done could have been done for arthritis, they could have been done for cancer, whatever. But in trusting the intelligence of the body, it corrected itself. The intelligence is the spirit coming through physical form, and I have a tremendous respect for that. We don’t need to correct the body. We just need to release stress and tension and then the natural intelligence within allows healing to happen.
Julie: So often we hear that we can heal ourselves. Doesn’t that make you feel guilty, when people adopt this belief, try it with all their heart and then don’t get well?
Nischala: Absolutely. There are two aspects here: one is that we can heal ourselves, the flip side of that is that we cause our own disease. This is a misinterpretation of a very high philosophy. A high philosophy can be misunderstood when brought down to the mundane.
On the causal plane, disturbances manifest. It’s not that we cause illness or disease. It comes to us for reasons usually unknown to us from the causal plane, and filters down to the physical body. So, it’s not necessarily that I’m doing something bad for my knee to hurt. There might be some other reason that this particular knee would be affected in that way.
Again, we try to simplify everything in the West. We say, ‘Oh, you caused your pain. If you just changed your attitude, the pain would go away.’ This is not always true and the blame alone can cause greater pain.
Julie: It also becomes egocentric when we say, ‘I caused this and I can heal it.’
Nischala: That’s right. There’s the mistaken identity that the ego is in charge instead of the divine self. The divine self helps us learn certain lessons and often it is through the body.
Julie: Beautiful. Whatever we’re handed is a gift from the divine, to help us learn.
Nischala: A line from a Rumi poem that expresses this is: “I needed more grace than I thought.” To me, this means that the grace brings us to knowing whether we can change the physical, change our attitude toward the physical or accept it all.
What yoga tells us is that there’s really only one cause for disease, which is that we have forgotten who we are. And all of this is just to remind us of that. Swami Satchidananda used to say, ‘the hospitals are the ashrams of today.’ He said, ‘you can’t get people to go into an ashram,’ so they go into a hospital instead where they’re made to sit with themselves, to really look inside and see what their life is about.
Julie: Although, a lot of people in hospitals are on so many drugs that it’s impossible to have any kind of introspection or real external communication.
“When I sit with someone, they don’t care what kind of degree I have; they don’t care what kind of study I did, they just care if I’m present with them, if I’m peaceful and if I love them.”
Nischala: A lot of people are still coherent enough. If they sit there long enough and look at their life they start to question. ‘What happens if I don’t get well?’ ‘What’s important to me?’
Julie: Why did you call your new book The Secret Power of Yoga?
Nischala: I really believe that within Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, the essence of yoga is held. I hoped people could understand the yoga sutras in a simple way that relates to us now, in this modern age, yet keeps the essence of yoga intact. That’s the secret to the power of yoga, how it can relate to us right now.
Julie: But you tackled this for another reason, too, and that is to have a feminine perspective of the yoga sutras.
Nischala: Absolutely. The ways the text has been translated bothered me for a long time. You see, the yoga sutras is comprised of four books, and the third book talks about psychic powers and spiritual powers, and what’s ironic to me is that many of those powers that men are seeking, come natural to women.
Julie: You use words like miraculous and intuition, and you also foray into left and right brain hemisphere roles and differences.
Nischala: And the polarization between the heart and the head.
I got to know Patanjali well during the time I was studying and interpreting the Yoga Sutras; we had a very intimate relationship. There’s a story toward the end of the book where I tell about a direct transmission from him in India.
I learned Patanjali was a reformer. He realized that the times were changing – it was shifting into Kali Yuga, which is the Iron Age – and that people were not going to learn the Vedas. People were not going to study the Upanishads. So what he did was make this great wisdom accessible for people so it could be preserved. He worded the sutras, in a simple way, and distilled the Upanishads, the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita into 195 aphorisms. He was a reformer who was speaking to the people of his day.
Now we’re coming to the other side of Kali Yuga and the repression of women that took place during that period is disappearing and women are taking the spotlight again. I felt that this is the next reformation and the next reforming of the yoga sutras for a particular group of people that are now emerging and practicing and living yoga.
Julie: I suppose also that cultural events shaped many translations during this time.
Nischala: Yet the truth is truth. The British ruled India for over 200 years and before that time the sacred teachings were never translated, they were always kept in the ancient languages. When the British came in, they then began translating some of these scriptures into English. It’s like taking a peach and trying to make apple pie out of it. They were translated into a pragmatic language like English, and affected by what the translators brought from Europe and England during the Protestant reformation and puritanical movement. This puritanical mindset was brought in when the sutras, the Gita, Upanasads and the Vedas were translated.
Julie: These were attempts at understanding, though, were they not?
“Swami Satchidananda used to say, ‘the hospitals are the ashrams of today.’”
Nischala: Yes, but they didn’t understand the teachings because of their mindset and the lack of understanding within their hearts. One example is, what I consider the simple way the incredible teachings of the yama and niyama got reduced to ten commandments. Yama and niyama doesn’t tell us what thou shalt not do. What it tells us, and again this is my way of thinking because I tried to project myself into Sat Yuga consciousness, is ‘this is who you are.’ Ahimsa does not say to you, don’t kill anyone.
Julie: What does ahimsa say?
Nischala: It says to have reverence for all beings, which is a very different way of looking at it. It’s not someone standing there and shaking their finger at you and saying don’t do this. Instead it’s saying (whispered) ‘remember who you are. Remember you’re a divine being, how would you act?’ I’d have reverence for all beings. I’d speak the truth with integrity.
It’s not that I try to keep myself from stealing anything; it’s not even in my thoughts. And instead of striving toward non-greed or greedlessness, I’d have an awareness of abundance. If I have an awareness of abundance, why would I be greedy? I’d think everything is just going to keep flowing.
Julie: Clearly, you took it from a different perspective.
Nischala: I took it standing at a Sat Yuga consciousness…we are already that…tat twam asi…thou art that.
Julie: Your thoughts on yoga therapy as profession. What should we be paying attention to?
Nischala: Yoga is our relationship with higher self. And as Westerners, we don’t really know very much about a relationship with ourselves. We’re told ‘don’t just stand there, do something.’ We can’t sit and be with ourselves for even ten or fifteen minutes, let alone a long period of time. This introspection is a vital component to becoming whole, healing.
The most important thing to me about practicing yoga therapy is that the therapist knows who they are. And we know who we are by having some kind of inner spiritual practice.
I’ve worked with many people over the years and a therapist can get burned out if they do know have a sense of where this healing power is coming from. Often, the therapist will say ‘I’m gonna save this person.’ Many people who are ill are low in vital prana. When you sit with them it’s almost like a siphon. If you’re not full with this divine prana, if you’re not getting it from within you or above or wherever your source is, you’re going to be empty.
Julie: As healers then, we need to maintain good prana.
Nischala: Absolutely vital to maintain good clear prana. But this brings up another question: Who’s the healer? When I am with people, I don’t really see them as ill. Their bodies may be ill, but they are still divine. They’re just beings on this plane, trying to realize who they are, and the body by being ill is showing them to look further within. If I ever thought for one second that it was I who was healing them, my prana would be depleted. I tell my students and patients who come to me, ‘I can’t heal you. You’re the only one who can draw in that divine energy to heal.’
Julie: People who call themselves healers are people who know who they are and allow others to heal themselves, is that right?
“What yoga tells us is that there’s really only one cause for disease, which is that we have forgotten who we are.”
Nischala: They’re holding up a mirror of strong prana to somebody, saying, ‘this is what it looks like, mimic that.’ They’re teaching people how to heal themselves. That is the greatness of yoga.
When we started with our heart study, one of the main things that we realized in the beginning was that we couldn’t heal anybody. And we would tell people this, and they would get real upset with us and they would say, ‘well, that’s what I came to you for.’ I’d say, ‘No, no, no, you didn’t come to us to be healed, you came to us because you didn’t know how, because you needed guidance to help yourself heal.’
I think it’s a very presumptuous to call yourself a healer. And I don’t really know any great healers who would call themselves healers. You can be known as a healer, but you always know who the healer is, really.
Julie: The discussion of Yoga Therapy as an emerging profession is pretty new. What do you think about Yoga Therapy as an emerging profession?
Nischala: It scares me. I overheard someone in the elevator at the Yoga Therapy conference say that some people are saying that you should have a bachelor’s degree before you can be a yoga therapist. That is not what Yoga Therapy is to me.
Julie: What is it?
Nischala: As Yoga Therapy is becoming more and more academic, and many people think Yoga Therapy is a body of knowledge to be learned, who am I to say it’s not? I just know that when I sit with someone who is ill or in pain, they don’t care if or what kind of degree I have. They don’t care what kind of study I did, they just care if I’m present with them, if I’m peaceful and if I love them.
But it’s the American way, all this intellectual learning. To a certain extent I’m part of it, and to a certain extent I refuse to be part of it. And I have to ask, ‘what happened to the intuitive?’
Julie: Can you have yoga without the spiritual?
Nischala: Can you have water without wetness? I don’t think it’s possible.
Nischala Joy Devi teaches at retreats and conferences worldwide, conducts teacher trainings and leads pilgrimages to India. www.abundantwellbeing.com
