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A Halifax Yogi

When you think of yoga, you probably think of deep meditation and physical flexibility. Few consider the practice of yoga as simple as putting money in a parking meter. But yoga, says renowned professor and author Ravi Ravindra, is not the action itself, but who your actions are serving.

“Reward and punishment are the two forces which govern most of our daily lives,” he says. “People wish to be rewarded and they fear being punished. These motivations are materialistic, or selfish.” But Ravindra says the point is not to denounce materials or money. Instead, he’s talking about an attitude: “Basically the attitude of a materialistic life is that the universe is centered on me, everything is for my glory or my self-advancement.”

Dr. Ravi Ravindra’s international perspective has led him all over the world. But for more than 40 years, he has called Nova Scotia home.

So whether your reward is being a responsible citizen, or your fear is getting a parking ticket, or your belief is that the world is subject to very large laws and energies in which we have a part to play, Ravindra says that it is the recognition of this motivation that is most important. In his recent book, The Spiritual Roots of Yoga: Royal Path to Freedom, he presents the challenge of self-examination.

I have many good friends and fellow searchers in the area and I am happy to engage in exchanges with them about serious spiritual and philosophical matters. But it is fair to say that I feel quite at home in many parts of the world and could move elsewhere if some matter of importance arose. However, I feel that Nova Scotia has something special and magical about it. — Ravi Ravindra

“All our life is like a hologram: any little piece of it contains the whole and can reveal the whole,” he writes. “Our gestures, postures, tone of voice, behaviour to animals or to neighbours—any of these is a fit subject for investigation and can reveal a great deal about our inner self.”

Ravindra’s life began, like yoga, in India. He completed his Bachelor of Science and Masters of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, before moving to Canada in 1966. He then completed his Masters of Science and PhD in physics from the University of Toronto and a Masters of Arts in philosophy from Dalhousie University, where his is now a Professor Emeritus. He has traveled internationally, speaking about the roots of yoga and incorporating its origins and practices into our daily lives. A process, he says, which is not easy.

“The vast majority of human beings have very little freedom to engage with anything serious. We are engaged with making a living and just simply surviving,” he says. “Everybody occasionally thinks about serious things, especially when we have moments of great tragedy. Then we wonder, what’s the point? Why am I alive? Those questions are not wholly unheard, but very few people are able to engage with them seriously for any length of time.”

Yoga is not a method of answering these questions, but a practice in which you become open to their mystery. Ravindra gives the comparison of a radio; at any given time, it could be possible to hear Ravi Shankar playing sitar in New Delhi, or a station in Liverpool, England playing the Beatles, or Mozart being broadcast in Berlin. But if we are not properly tuned, we hear nothing.

“The purpose of yoga is to tune us,” says Ravindra. “And the first thing is to actually recognize that I need to tune myself properly. I need to align myself not only physically, but intellectually and emotionally.”

Intellectual tuning could be the admission that we don’t know all there is to know. Ravindra says that most of the time, we behave as if we do: “If somebody says something that sounds strange to me, such as ‘God is everywhere,’ if I’m so convinced I know everything there is to know, I say, ‘I’m not touched by God, so God doesn’t exist.’ But there is a mystery—even all our scientists put together don’t know all there is to know. Therefore I remain open.” Opening oneself to the unknown and to impartial self-examination has never been the status quo. Ravindra says our addiction to the known is for reasons of security, even if the status quo leaves us miserable or bored.

The purpose of yoga is to tune us ...
and the first thing is to actually
recognize that I need to tune
myself properly

“To change the status quo requires effort, it requires work. It could be physical work, psychological work, spiritual work,” he says. “In physics we would say that every particle seeks the lowest energy state. Every human seeks the lowest energy state.” Ravindra says there is a much closer relationship between the body and the mind than we realize. When people decide to undertake yoga purely for exercise, he says that fairly soon their body will become considerably more flexible. Those who have a flexible body, he says, cannot have a rigid mind.

“All the great traditions say, whether it is Christianity or Islam or Muslim, that if I am engaged only with myself or just with my immediate family and their welfare, that sooner or later I will be dissatisfied,” says Ravindra.

“Serving truth, serving love, even serving one’s own community; if people are filled with this as their motivation, they manifest more compassion, more love, and more selflessness.”•