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, take the “Spiritual Diary“, a “questionnaire” with 26 questions, and note down which activities have been completed. (It is given to you in the Sivananda ashrams)

The physical exercises

In the historical videos, he and his students can be seen practicing asana on the Ganges, which is primarily known in Europe as the Rishikeshreihe. According to the Sivananda Centers, Swami Sivananda referred to the Hathayoga Pradipika. Whether he himself was inspired by wise scholars is not known. Nor is it known how the Rishikeshreihe came into being. Did he possibly develop it while practicing with his students? The question of where the inspiration for the typical form of the Sivananda sun salutation came from also remains unanswered, 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.

Continue to page: Sivananda Yoga in the West