A seeker’s journey: Advaita — Kate O'Brien Wellness

Our MySatsang Community

Some of you may know that last year, along with my yogi and skincare colleague and friend Tara O’Rourke, I co-founded MySatsang an authentic community for yoga teachers, students and seekers to come together, support and nurture one another through authentic practices, inspirational teachings and mindful movement.

We are growing, slowly and organically, which was always our intention. Our website is in development and once we can, we will offer a combination of both on-location and online gatherings and workshops for our satsang community. In the meantime, we have been collaborating online with expert teachers from various disciplines and currently in the middle of a 4-week immersion with Mandala Ashram in Wales, where coincidentally Michael McCann, our yoga philosophy teacher and our MySatsang wise elder and chair, consolidated his own teachings.

Advaita

This week it was the deeply wise, often humorous, Swami SatyaDaya who left me at once, deeply grateful and overwhelmed with a desire to delve deeper still. Advaita, or nonduality was the subject. As students we studied this in our teacher training and to be honest, I have always found it quite a complex topic which thankfully did not feature in our final exams! Not this time. Swami SatyaDaya’s guidance was mesmerising. I know I am not alone in my feelings either as the praise for his words is still landing with Tara, Michael McCann and our growing MySatsang community.

Advaita, also known as Vedanta and Gyana Yoga, proclaims that the Awareness, or Conscious Presence in each human being is osmotically, holographically and intimately linked to Reality. It is universal and eternal, beyond birth, life and death. However, due to limitations of the human mind, we find it difficult to grasp our essential nature. Advaita does not seek to explain Reality (as in western philosophy) but rather to point the finger at the direct realisation of Reality.

With my practical, Western oriented mind, this is not easy to digest. Swami SatyaDaya’s words sparked my thinking about the importance of yoga and everything this rich philosophy that has become an integral part of my own life has to offer. Hardly a day goes by when my mat is not rolled out and some form of practice unfolds. This said, in my busy, ‘yang’ life of ‘doing’ I know I have been overly reliant on the physical asana practice. It is the ‘being’, the yin, that my body, and most especially my mind, is craving. It’s been calling out for some time, but I have been too busy to really listen. Until now.

We are fortunate to be on this particular journey as yoga has something to suit our collective personalities and eccentricities; sharing gifts to help us thrive and shine. “We all have a yoga that sets us on fire,” says Swami SatyaDaya. There is a path, a ‘style’ for everyone in this mix and once that spark is ignited, we follow it naturally in our lives. From hatha, ashtanga and kundalini to nidra and yin, they all support our enquiry into who or what is dreaming us into being.

I am currently studying a foundations course on the transformational texts includingThe Bhagavad Gita and the Vedic scriptures, the Four Noble Truths, the Tao Te Ching and the devotional poetry of Rumi and Hafiz, amongst others. All dance to somewhat different music, but they all touch the same truth, just as these different threads of yoga weave the same tapestry– Advaita.

Swami SatyDaya later quotes Shakespeare’s (Act 4, Scene 1) The Tempest: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” To this, the ever-wise Michael McCann, MySatsang Chair and wise elder, added that Shakespeare was indeed a mystical writer and these lines express beautifully the advaitic contention that the world is similar to a dream, and our journey is to ‘awaken from the dream of life’. “The world is not sustained by our individual dream, as we share a consensual reality, but by the ‘Cosmic Dreamer’ - the dream of Vishnu in Hindu symbology,” he adds. “He ‘dreams’ the world and forgets himself in the dream, and then ‘remembers’ Himself in the composite ‘awakening’ of each of us. That is why yoga talks of ‘remembering rather than discovery’ when we realise our true identity: Tat Tvam Asi: You are That.”

Life’s sweet Amrit

Life can be challenging but it is also rich, sweet and beautiful as we all know. We need this movement, the waves and the polarities. We can’t have one without the other. “When we are doing spiritual work there is churning, there is unrest,” Swami SatyaDaya adds. “But this has to happen for the amrit, the deliciously sweet nectar of immortality, to rise to the surface. This is the price of being embodied.” And I will happily continue sitting on my mat, riding these waves of busyness and stillness, the yin and the yang, in my ever unfolding journey to my own personal connection with the Universe. The yogic saying; ‘when the student is ready, the teacher will come,’ finally makes sense.

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Living in harmony with nature’s rhythms at Mandala Ashram in Wales