What is Saptanga Yoga?
Saptanga yoga is a seven-part system for enlightenment revealed by Paramahamsa Nithyananda. Saptanga Yoga plays a major role and is the underlying thread in Nithya Yoga practice. These seven parts are meant to be practiced consciously and simultaneously, and become the lifestyle of Nithya Yoga acharyas:
1. Providing authentic listening to self and others
2. Completing with self and others
3. Living with integrity with ones words to self and others
4. Living with authenticity to ones thoughts
5. Living with responsibility to ones feelings
6. Enriching (constantly expanding) oneself and others
7. Causing the reality for self and be the cause of others to cause their reality
These seven parts are for our thinking and logic, our actions and interactions and methodology in teaching. Nithya Yoga acharyas teach from the space of awareness and consciousness, the space of completion, to enrich and cause their reality and be the cause of their students’ reality. Acharya means the one who practices and lives what he or she teaches.
Living in AIRE
Nithya Yoga is not simply information that the teacher carries and disseminates, or information that is left in the classroom. What is being taught in Nithya Yoga is a state of being, a way of living. A teacher can lead the student only as far as he himself has gone. He can point a light only into places that he himself has been willing to go. He can empathize with the student’s personal quest, and the issues that may arise during that quest, only because he himself has embarked on such a journey. So, first and foremost, a great yoga acharya should be an example of how life should be lived, regardless of the style, school, or tradition from which the yoga practice originated. To move towards this space, Nithya Yoga acharyas practice AIRE:
• Authenticity
• Integrity
• Responsibility
• Enriching
When one radiates the space of high consciousness and awareness, he or she is able to enrich others and cause their reality.
A small story:
Once, a lady went to the doctor’s office with her son who had eaten too many sweets. She asked the doctor, “Please tell my son to stop eating all these candies!” The doctor replied, “Come back in a week.”
One week later, the lady came back, and this time, the doctor sat with the son and told him, “Stop eating candies. They will ruin your health.”
The mom was surprised. She asked the doctor, “Why didn’t you tell him that a week ago?”
The doctor said: “A week ago, I was also struggling with my habit. Now that I quit, I’m able to tell him to stop!”
An acharya shares and radiates his experience and is taking your towards your highest possibility through his or her experiences of yoga. That is why, when an acharya leads a class, his words come spontaneously from his inner experience; when an acharya asks you to inhale bliss and exhale bliss, he is also inhaling and exhaling bliss; when the acharya takes you into the deeper space of meditation, it is because he has also experienced meditation; when the acharya invites you to drop any incompletions, it is because he has also dropped his incompletions.