Swami Sivananda – a great saint of India

Swami Sivananda is one of the great saints of India.
He lived from 1887 to 1963.

He initially studied medicine under his birth name Kuppuswami Iyer and settled in Rishikesh in 1924. Rishikesh is one of the seven holy cities of India and is located where the Ganges flows out of the Himalayas, where many sadhus stay in the ashrams.

He also became a sadhu and adopted his new name Swami Sivananda. In 1936, he founded an ashram, theDivine Life Society, where he spent the rest of his life. Nevertheless, he was open-minded and also western-oriented. We will come to this later.

As a spiritual teacher, he instructed many students. They lived with him in a classically close relationship for 12 years at his side in the ashram. After 12 years, the discipleship ended and he sent them out into the world to carry out various tasks.

Some well-known students are:

• Swami Vishnu Devananda – Founder of the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centres
• Swami Krishnananda, his successor in Rishikesh
• Swami Chidananda, he continued to lead the Divine Life Society
• Swami SatChidAnanda, opened the Woodstock Festival
• Swami Omkarananda, settled in Switzerland
• Swami Sivananda Radha, originally German Sylvia Hellman, settled in Kananda

Here are some authentic impressions of his life and work in Rishikesh:

“Free from yoga”

It is worth finding out a little more about his personality. He worked tirelessly and was always full of a joyful creative urge. He got up very early at 3 a.m., an hour before his pupils, and his day ended around 11 at night. Every minute of his day was filled with activities that he accomplished with joy and zest for action. His cheerfulness was remarkable and impressed the pupils and visitors.

He knew that you cannot work your way up from the earthly to the spiritual with techniques and methods.

Swami Sivananda, as an initiate into the spiritual worlds, knew deeply that one cannot reach the spirit with yoga practices. He was therefore “free from yoga”.

The joy, cheerfulness and light-heartedness of his personality must have had something to do with this realization and mindset. Instead, he dedicated himself to serving others and worked tirelessly, his guiding principles being:

SERVE – LOVE – MEDITATE – REALIZE

This raises the question of why you should do so many exercises and impose a strict daily routine on yourself if this does not lead to your spiritual goal!

This daily routine“The 20 rules of Sivananda” is printed below. In the evening, you take the “Spiritual Diary“, a “questionnaire” with 26 questions, and note down which activities you have completed. (They are handed out in the Sivananda ashrams)

The physical exercises

In the historical videos, you can see him and his students practicing asana on the Ganges, which is known primarily in Europe as the Rishikeshreihe. According to the Sivananda Centers, Swami Sivananda was referring to the Hathayoga Pradipika. Whether he himself was inspired by wise scholars is not known. Furthermore, nothing is known about how the Rishikeshreihe came about. Did he possibly develop them while practicing with his students? The question of where the impulses for the typical form of the Sivananda sun salutation come from also remains open, as this differs significantly from the form of sunprayer A and B of Ashtangayoga, for example.

After 12 years of ashram life, he sent Vishnu Devananda to America, where he established the now world-famous “Sivananda Yoga Ashrams”: Sivananda Yoga in the West.

A detailed vita of Swami Sivanada can be found on Aurora Wiki. It is particularly interesting to study the work of the soul of this great saint.

Continue to page: Sivananda Yoga in the West