Yoga Can Make One Much Happier

Here is my story about my experience with yoga. One thing that I have learned from yoga is that misery and suffering are limited. They can only go so far. But peace, love and happiness have no limit. They can keep growing until they are infinite if you want to call that their limit.

At around 8 years old I was talking to my mother at a restaurant. We ate out about 4 times a week. I was trying to figure out what I am alive for. I did not believe the whole idea of heaven and hell. So I figured that if I am going to die at the end of my life and be gone, what is the purpose of it.

I knew that people get educations, jobs, get married, have kids and then they die. It is like spending 20 years to build something and as soon as you are done building it, you burn it down. I did a huge amount of reading and came across the philosophy of yoga. It said that man is not a body but an immortal soul. Note that hundreds of years before Jesus was born, Socrates taught this.

A person reincarnates and does all these things with his body like eating food, sex, working, vacations to find peace and happiness. He does not find these but will always find death. Peace and happiness lie in finding out that you are a soul and feeling the endless bliss of the soul. The incarnations are compared to a wheel that a hamster runs on. It goes round and round but never goes anywhere. Now the above made complete sense since I could feel that I was not just a piece of flesh or a meat-body.

So I started doing yoga postures (hatha yoga) since that is the most common association with yoga, at age 12. It took about 25 minutes and I could feel it stimulating different glands causing them to release hormones that make you feel good. So I learned that drugs and alcohol are bad for you and avoided ever taking them. Many have taken up yoga for depression, insomnia, being bi-polar and other mental/emotional problems.

So I do not know what potential problems that I have avoided both physically and mentally. When I read about others, I am surprised by all the problems they have had in their life. I now understand that the body was made to be stretched for it to work properly. If that is not done then problems develop. The last posture or pose that I would do was the corpse posture. I would lay there and become very relaxed. I learned from doing that, that life is easy and feels good when you are relaxed and when you are not relaxed, life is hell.

Here is an odd thing that happened when I was in the corpse posture after doing the above daily for several years. I would hear these strange sounds that were not coming from the outside, but the inside. But I knew everything was okay since I could feel extremely okay. In fact people do things for one basic reason-- because it makes them feel good. That is why people do yoga. People take drugs because of this also but the body produces an opposite effect to what a drug produces. For example pot relaxes people temporarily and permanently they get more paranoid. Exercise makes your heart beat faster temporarily and the permanent effect is a slower resting heart rate.

So I started doing yoga at age 12 and still do it now after decades. At age 20 I learned a meditation taught by Prem Rawat. There is a book by a minster (Don Piper) that died and went to heaven and then came back. The book is called 90 Minutes in Heaven and has sold over 6 million copies. The describes being in heaven and the guy saw incredible light wherever he went and heard strange heavenly music wherever he went.

Now as far as his imagination, this is not what he would imagine heaven to be like. He never saw God in heaven. So it was missing God, that is what he would imagine to be there and it had strange light and music or sounds that are not supposed to be there. He has no explanation for it.

So when I learned about this meditation that I started doing, it was not about imagining anything. It was about focusing on a light that is inside of me and a music or sounds that are inside of me. And yes that is what I was hearing when I would do the corpse posture. This light and music is what the soul looks and sounds like-- pure nonphysical energy.

So I have been learning more about what I really am and becoming less obsessed with all these things that disappear when I die (or when my body dies). Wikipedia had the following under yoga philosophy but removed it: "In all branches of yoga, the ultimate goal is the attainment of an eternal state of perfect consciousness."

So in my life I get to a new higher level of happiness that I have never experienced before every few months. I guess you can call it a deeper and more powerful sense of peace, love, fulfillment and happiness. It is not coming from the outside but from the inside by getting to know my true nature better and better.