Inner Engineering: A Yogi’s Guide to Joy

by Sadhguru

Sadhana It is important not to keep eating through the day. If you are below thirty years of age, three meals every day will fit well into your life. If you are over thirty years of age, it is best to reduce it to two meals per day. Our body and brain work at their best only when the stomach is empty. So be conscious of eating in such a way that within two and a half hours, your food moves out of the stomach, and within twelve to eighteen hours completely out of the system. With this simple awareness you will experience much more energy, agility, and alertness. These are the ingredients of a successful life, irrespective of what you choose to do with it.

Your physical body is just an accumulation of food.

What kind of stuff you put into it determines the quality of the body and how comfortable it is with itself.

When it comes to food, it is about the body. Ask the body what kind of food it is most comfortable with, not your tongue. The kind of food your body feels most comfortable with is always the ideal food to eat. You must learn to listen to your body. As your body awareness evolves, you will know exactly what a certain food will do to you.

Sadhana You can experiment: arrange the best possible meal for yourself, get angry with something, curse the whole world, and then eat it. You will see that day how food behaves within you. At the next meal, approach your food with the reverence that the life-making material deserves and eat it. You will now see how it will behave within you. (Of course, if you’re sensible, you’ll ignore the first and only do the second!) Most people can bring down the quantum of food they are eating to a third and be much more energetic and not lose weight. It is just a question of how much receptivity you have created within yourself. Accordingly your body receives. If you can do the same amount of work, maintain all the bodily processes, with thirty percent of the food that you eat, that definitely means you are running a much more efficient machine.

In yoga, there is absolutely nothing religious, philosophical, spiritual, or moral about the food that we eat. It is only a question of whether the food is compatible with the kind of body that we own.

Sadhana The consumption of a spoonful of clarified butter (ghee in India) on a daily basis a few minutes before a meal does wonders for the digestive system. If you eat clarified butter with sugar, as in sweets, it is digested and turns into fat. But clarified butter with out sugar can cleanse, heal, and lubricate the alimentary canal. Additionally, the cleansing of the colon will immediately manifest as a certain glow and aliveness in your skin. Even those who prefer not to consume dairy products could experiment with this because clarified butter passes through the system largely with out getting digested.

A mandala is a cycle of forty to forty-eight days that the human system goes through. In every cycle, there will be three days on which your body does not need food.

The day the system says “no food” is a cleanup day. Since most people are not aware of which day their body should go without food, the day of Ekadashi was fixed in the Indian calendar. Ekadashi is the eleventh day of the lunar segment and recurs every fourteen days. It is traditionally regarded as the day to fast.

before fasting, prepare the body by consuming the right kind of nourishment, particularly high-water-content foods like fruits and vegetables. It may not be a good thing for everybody to fast, but it has many benefits if it is done with proper understanding.

What kind of food you eat, how much you eat, how you eat, turning it from a compulsive pattern into a conscious process: this is the essence of fasting.

Sadhana Just experiment. Start with twenty-five percent natural, uncooked, or live food—fruit or vegetables—today, and slowly push it up to a hundred percent in about four or five days. Stay there for a day or two, and again cut it down by ten percent and in another five days you will reach fifty percent raw food, fifty percent cooked food. This is ideal for most people, who wish to be active for sixteen to eighteen hours a day. Remember, if you eat cooked food, it may take you fifteen minutes to eat a meal. If you eat raw food, you take a little more time to eat the same quantum of food, because you have to chew a little more. But the nature of the body is such that after fifteen minutes the body will tell you that your meal is over. So people tend to eat much less and lose weight. All it takes is being a little more conscious of how much you are eating.

Restfulness essentially defines the replenishing and rejuvenating capability of the body.

you are capable of being vibrantly active and still relaxed, then it is worthwhile.

What the body needs is not sleep but restfulness. If you keep the body very relaxed through the day, your sleep quota will go down naturally. If your work and taking a walk or exercising are also relaxation for you, your sleep quota will drop even further.

Don’t battle with life. You are not anti-life; you are life. Just get in tune with it and you will see that you will pass through it easily. Keeping yourself fit and well is not a battle.

There is no need to fix the quota of either food or sleep. To program the calories you must consume and the number of hours you must sleep is a foolish way to handle life. Let the body decide how much it should eat today, not you.

when you feel sufficiently relaxed you come awake. The moment the body is rested it will wake up—whether it be at three or four or eight o’clock. When it comes to food and sleep, your body is the best judge.

Keep the body in such a way that it is not longing to avoid or escape life. Maintain it in such a way that it is longing to come awake.

Sadhana If you sleep without a pillow or with a very low pillow, which doesn’t allow the spine to get pinched, the neuronal regeneration of the brain and the cellular regeneration of the neurological system will be much better. If you sleep without a pillow, it is best to lie on your back in a supine position, rather than on your side. Lying in this position is referred to in yoga as shavasana: it enhances the purification and rejuvenation of the body, promotes the free flow of movement in the energy system, bringing relaxation and vitality. But there is no reason to get dogmatic about this. (At least in your sleep, don’t take a position!)

Existence is a dance between the unmanifest and the manifest. The moment there is a manifestation, there is duality: light and darkness, male and female, birth and death, and so on.

All duality is striving for unity because what was once one has manifested itself as two; now there is a perpetual longing to become one.

Your individuality means not only false boundaries that you have set up in your mental framework in the form of your preferences and dislikes, tastes and opinions. It also means you are trapped within the boundaries of your own physical body. You may not be consciously aware, but the life within you is longing to break these boundaries.

These two energies, which in the human race we call “masculine” and “feminine,” are always trying to come together. At the same time, except for this longing to be together, they are opposites.

A lot of people cannot face the basic physical act as it is, so they have invented all kinds of decorations around it to make it beautiful. You always add emotion to it, because without emotion it would seem ugly.

Sex is natural; it is there in the body. Sexuality is something you invented; it is psychological. If sex is in the body, it is fine, it is beautiful. The moment it enters your mind, it becomes a perversion. It has no business with your mind. Sex is a small aspect of you,

Sadhana The higher possibilities of life are housed in the human body. The physical body is a platform for all possibilities from the gross to the sacred. You can perform simple acts of eating, sleeping, and sex as acts of grossness, or you can bring a certain dimension of sanctity to all these aspects. This sanctity can be achieved by bringing subtler thought, emotion, and intention into these acts. Above all, remember that the grossness and sanctity of something is largely decided by your unwillingness and unconsciousness, or your willingness and consciousness. Every breath, every step, every simple act, thought, and emotion can acquire the stance of the sacred if conducted recognizing the sanctity of the other involved—whether a person or a foodstuff or an object that you use. Of all the loving acts that two human beings are capable of, the simple act of holding hands can often become the most intimate. Why is this so? Basically, because the nature of the hands and feet is such that the energy system finds expression in these two parts of the body in a very singular way. Two palms coming together have far more intimacy than the contact between any other parts of the body. You can try this with yourself. You don’t even need a partner. When you put your hands together, the two energy dimensions within you (right-left, masculine-feminine, solar-lunar, yin-yang, etc.) are linked in a certain way, and you begin to experience a sense of unity within yourself. This is the logi...

Your body is just a loan from this planet. What you call “death” is just Mother Earth reclaiming the loan that she offered to you. All life on this planet is just a recycle of the Earth.

If all that you have known is the body—and anyway you are going to lose it—anxiety and fear will be your constant companions.

Fear is a result of the incompleteness of your existence.

MORTALITY AND PROFUNDITY Only when you recognize your mortal nature do you want to know what more there is to life. It is then that the spiritual process opens up. Once it happened . . . Two men over eighty years of age met. One recognized the other and said, “Did you fight in World War II?” The other man said, “Yes.” The first asked him where, and with which battalion. The other man told him. The first exclaimed, “Oh, my God! Don’t you recognize me? We were in the same foxhole!” Oh, they hit it off! They talked and talked. All that they had actually seen was about forty minutes of an intense combat situation. But they talked about every bullet that went by, zing, zing, just missing them by inches. They spoke for over four hours about those forty minutes. When they had exhausted everything that they could say about that time, one asked the other, “What have you been doing since the war?” “Oh, for the past sixty years, I’ve just been a salesman.” Those forty minutes had come to define their lives because their mortality was dangling in front of them at every moment. In battle they had forged a bond that was profound. Beyond that, this man’s life could be summed up in a single sentence: he was just a salesman. You discover an indescribable profundity within yourself when you realize your mortal nature. If you have not realized your eternal nature you must at least realize your mortal nature. Death is not the end of life. Death is simply the end of the body. If you have lived...

If you tell yourself you don’t want to think a certain thought, that is precisely the first thing your mind will produce! That is the nature of the human mind.

The system of yoga is a technology to create a distinction between you and your mind. There is a space between you and what you have gathered in terms of body and mind. Becoming conscious of this space is your first and only step to freedom.

There are only two forms of suffering in this world: physical and mental. Once this distance becomes a constant factor in your experience, you have reached the end of suffering. With the elimination of the fear of suffering, you can walk life full stride, unafraid to explore all that life has to offer.

Yoga is a journey toward a reality in which you experience the ultimate nature of existence as borderless unity

Yoga is simply chitta vritti nirodha. That means, if the activity of your mind ceases and you are still alert, you are in yoga.

Sadhana Remind yourself at least once an hour that everything you’re carrying—your handbag, your money, your relationships, the heaviness in your heart and body—are things that you’ve accumulated over a period of time. If you become more and more conscious of this fundamental fact even as a process of dis-identification grows within you—balanced by a deep sense of involvement in everything around you—you will move from the misery and madness of the human mind toward meditativeness.

you are, therefore you may think.

Your mental process is a very small happening compared to the life process, but right now it has become far more important. It is time for humanity to shift the significance to the life process once again. The need is an urgent one. Our lives depend on it.

If you want to know the experiential dimensions of life, you will never know them with the petty process of thought.

This is the fundamental choice you have: either you learn to live with creation, or you manufacture your own creation in your head.

A human being who has transcended his intellect, the discriminatory and logical dimensions of his life, is a Buddha.

The essence of yoga, as we have said before, is just this—to arrive at that moment where there is a clear space between you and your mind. Once this happens, a life of heightened clarity, perception, and freedom has begun. This is the birth of freedom.

Sadhana You could try this simple practice. Set your tap in such a way that only five to ten drops fall per minute. See if you can observe each drop—how it forms, how it falls, how it splashes on the ground. Do this for fifteen to twenty minutes a day. You will gradually become conscious of many things around and within you that you are completely unaware of right now. This simple exercise can initiate a process of sensitization and clarity and accomplish much more than you can possibly imagine. In this simple process, you are actually exploring one limb of yoga referred to as dharana, which means “that which flows.” It is not the water we are referring to here. It is your attention, and, in turn, your consciousness. The attempt is to make your attention flow and connect with its object—in this case, water. This is not an exercise in observation or appreciation. It is an exercise in attention—in turning what is sporadic and intermittent into a flow. (In the larger scheme of things, the water and you are already one. Your individuality is only your idea.)

Once your intellect—or buddhi, as it is termed in the yogic taxonomy—gets identified with something, you function within the realm of this identity. Whatever you are identified with, all your thoughts and emotions spring from that identity.

The identity around which the intellect functions is called ahankara.

it is your identity that manages and determines your intellect.

if you are able to disentangle yourself from everything that you are not—if you dis-identify, as it were—you will see that the mind turns just blank and empty. When you want to use it, you can; at other times, it will simply be empty, devoid of all psychological clutter. That is how it should be.

If you employ your intelligence and make an attempt to reach your ultimate nature, this is called gnana yoga, or the yoga of knowing. Gnana yogis cannot afford to identify themselves with anything. If they do, that is the end of their journey.

Sadhana Just sit alone for an hour. No reading, no television, no phone, no communication, nothing. Just see in the course of this hour what thoughts dominate your mind—whether it is food, sex, your car, your furniture, your jewelry, or anything else. If you find yourself thinking recurrently about people or things, your identification is essentially with your body. If your thoughts are about what you would like to do in the world, your identification is essentially with your mind. Everything else is just a complex set of offshoots of these two aspects. This is not a value judgment. It is just a way of knowing what stage of life you’re at. How quickly you want to evolve depends on your own choices.