Yoga – the Sublime Union

Namaste. My name is Radhamadhav Das, or simply Madhav, as my Yoga friends call me. I speak to you in the first person, as I don’t like to hide behind the third person and try be more personal. I’ve been teaching Yoga since over twenty years and love sharing the art. I teach groups and persons one-on-one, both online and offline. I also organize and guide Yoga tours in holy places like Rishikesh and Vrindavan that combine Hatha-yoga with Bhakti-yoga, and I share Yoga insights in articles on platforms like the Yoga Life Magazine.

I love to take time for each student and cater to their needs by tailoring their practice to their individual nature. I specialize in teaching the heart of Yoga, which is not just the commonly taught union of body, mind and soul, but more so the mystic or Sublime Union of the soul with the Supersoul, or the Divine in all His and Her wonderful manifestations.

Yoga literally means “union.” Unless we know which Sublime Union Yoga essentially embodies, we can miss the point and actual treasure of Yoga. It’s sort of like being invited to a royal marriage, but you get stuck in the Lobby, because you don’t know what a marriage is all about. So, if you don’t want to get stuck in the Lobby of Instagram Yoga and actually want to attend the royal wedding of the Sublime Union of your soul with the Divine, then you have to practice actual mystical Yoga. And the good news is that, postural Yoga, if sublimely embodied, can greatly benefit us in realizing this Sublime Union.

Traditional Yoga

I learned Yoga from Shri Ganesh Ji in Chennai, south India. Shri Ganesh Ji is a Yoga teacher coming in the lineage of Swami Sivananda Saraswati. Sivananda Yoga focusses on the traditional Yoga that serves the goal of attaining samadhi or complete absorption in the Sublime Union with the Divine. How exactly you relate to the Divine depends on your personal nature and choice. In any case, Yoga helps you to amplify your mental focus, strengthen your body, and pierce through the layers that cover your soul.

The asanas or bodily postures in combination with pranayama or breath exercices, healthy habits and powerful meditation practices actually lead to an alchemical transformation of your body-mind by purifying its gross and subtle layers. This includes the opening and flooding of the nadis or subtle pathways with divine energy, which not only rejuvenate our chakras or energy centres, but our entire being from the cellular to the cosmic level. Once your nadis are open and flooded with the nectar of divine energy, it becomes much easier to have spiritual breakthroughs and realizations in any spiritual tradition. However, this traditional Yoga practice requires regular practice and discipline, like in any other serious discipline. This traditional Yoga does not engage with the Instagram Yoga circus with all its TTC certificates etc. It only cares for traditional individual one-on-one nourishment that is rooted in actual realization, which no paper can certify. My masters never offered me any paper. They taught me the practice and guaranteed my success if I practice seriously.

I can also guarantee you the same thing. This guarantee, and being connected with a lineage of actual successful Yogis, is worth much more than countless papers. I can additionally give you a certificate if you need it for teaching etc. But it should not be your main motivation.

Everyone has 20 Minutes a Day

Don’t worry, we won’t start with this challenging peacock posture. This foto is just to show, that even if you have young kids around you, you can still take out time for Yoga. All asanas and practices in my curriculum have easy adaptations that can be followed by anyone.

For the Sublime Union Yoga curriculum, I have designed a daily practice of a minimum of only 20 to 30 minutes combined with longer intervals of at least 2 hours or more once a month or once a week. This is something that everyone can commit to and then gradually expand, if desired. I guarantee, that anyone who follows the Sublime Yoga curriculum for at least three months, will achieve breakthroughs in their bodily and mental health, in their relationship to Nature, their beloveds, the Divine, and themselves.

Some of the elements of this curriculum are as follows:

– Short exercises to strengthen & warm up

– Short Qi Gong exercices that are extremely beneficial to ground us and to circulate Qi or Divine energy throughout our body-mind. I learnt Qi Gong from master Dave West in Bali. I have also practiced Pencak Silat or Indonesian Karate (under world champion Haka Tahir), which includes several Qi Gong movements.

– Unique Sublime Union practices that make us realize our nature of being the loving children of the Sublime Union of our Divine Parents, who are, although simultaneously situated in transcendence in many forms, also present here in many ways, and most tangible in their form as Mother Nature or Mother Earth and Father Sky/Sun.

– Genuine surya-namaskara with direct sun exposure, pranama-mantra and breathing in synch.

– 12 root asanas with re-earthing, breathing & chanting.

– Pranayama (healing breath): kapala-bhati, nadhi-shodhana & ujjayi.

– Boost your focus for any other practices like working, meditating, chanting & remembering.

– Easy mastery of padmasana or the most important lotus posture for life.

– Basics of Bhakti Yoga with focus on kirtan, singing mantras and spiritual chants.

– Nada Yoga essentials – the transformative power of sacred sound.

– Strengthen back & immune system to prevent or heal issues.

– Inner harmony of male & female energies.

– Pelvic floor empowerment for men and women – extremely powerful mastery of sexual energy.

– Tricks for brahmacarya or periods of celibacy (I’ve been a celibate monk for seventeen years).

– Lose or gain weight & learn radical acceptance.

And much more – we can even include other modalities like art, dancing, singing, martial art, wrestling and self-defense. Nothing is apart from Yoga. However, at the core, we should have a solid foundation anchored in time-proven tradition.

Oneness with Mother Nature

Since I can remember, my spiritual journey has always been one of deep connection with Mother Nature. The disconnection from Mother Nature both in the secular as well as in the religious spheres has directly led to the disconnection with our eternal nature. Sadly, I came across many “spiritual” people, who are completely disconnected from Nature, which has had vast dire consequences in their life.

My Yoga practice reintegrates a deep spiritual bond with Mother Nature into our daily spiritual practice. Together we discover the power of practice that is grounded physically, emotionally and spiritually in Mother Earth (especially water and earth), and the empowerment of our Divine Father through the sun/fire and sky/air. Embodied spirituality means that the Divine become alive in its most tangible forms of Nature and Nature’s elements. The Divine is not just transcendental, but also immanent, within all of creation, especially within the fundamental natural manifestations of creation. Hence, as much as possible, we practice Yoga in Mother Nature, re-connecting to the elements through direct touch by practicing, whenever possible, barefeet on the grass, and exposing our skin to the blessing rays of Father Sun.

We learn exercices that invoke and integrate both Divine Feminine Energies from Mother Earth and Divine Masculine Energies from Father Sky and combine them in their most powerful Sublime Union, from which creation has sprung forth and by which it is driven in eternity.

Yoga of the Heart – Bhakti Yoga

We live in an exciting time of Yoga rediscovery. Since a few years, more and more Yogis are rediscovering an additional descending Kundalini or Divine energy, that complements the ascending Kundalini. Usually, we only hear about the ascending Kundalini, and the common Yoga practice is thus a very masculine ascending process that sees the “lower” chakras as inferior to the “higher” chakras.

Since the goal of ascending to the highest crown chakra and ultimately exiting into transcendence has, due to neglect of the lower chakras, led to many forms of escapism and spiritual bypassing, many Yogis have started to call this approach the toxic “up-and-out” approach. The truly holistic approach to Yoga, however, integrates the descending Kundalini as well. She blesses us with being grounded, rooted in Mother Nature, and engaging in healthy ways with our embodiment, including family and eros, without any forms of escapism. The knowledge that we are ultimately beyond our material bodies (albeit also having spiritual bodies, if we wish so) need not lead to hatred towards everything connected to our body. Rather it should lead us to a more sublime engagement with our bodies.

This is, where most modern Yogis, including myself, depart from the typical “up-and-out” approach of many Yoga traditions like Vedanta. Another beautiful thing is that, the two Kundalinis meet in the centre chakra, in the heart, and their meeting or Sublime Union is the ultimate union or Yoga that we can aspire for. This, of course, reminds us of the Sublime Union of Radha-Krishna, Laksmi-Narayana, Parvati-Shiva and Sita-Rama of the Bhakti-Yoga tradition, that focusses mainly on the heart chakra. It is in the heart chakra, or in the hridaya-akasha or ether/sky space of the heart, where the Divine, and ultimately the Sublime Yoga or Union of the Divine Couple, will manifest.

To attract Their manifestation in our heart, corporal Yoga can help to purify us on the outer layers. However, the much needed purification on the deepest layers of our heart is only possible by direct devotion to the Divine in personal service, which is accomplished with Bhakti-Yoga. The easiest and most powerful Bhakti-Yoga practice is that of kirtan or chanting mantras or combination of the Holy Names of God-des. I am initiated into the tradition of Bhakti-Yoga by my spiritual master Srila Bhakti Ballabh Tirtha Maharaj, and have further learned from many other Bhakti-Yoga masters. Since Bhakti-Yoga is my main core practice, I also love to integrate it in brief in my Yoga teaching. We will hence also be learning Kirtan-Yoga together. Asides from its esoteric essentials, I can also teach you singing and playing instruments like harmonium, mridanga, kartals, guitar and ukelele during kirtan. If you want, we can also go deeper into Nada Yoga, which I learned from teachers like Pandit Chhannulal Mishra and Anandra George.

Connect

If this resonates with you and you are serious about entering the more mystical core of Yoga with discipline and the support of teachers and community, connect with me here and we’ll schedule a free call or first lesson. We’ll get to know each other briefly, and if it’s a match, we’ll roll out the mats and take off to the land of nectar together.