 Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi Switching people on (and off) A Belfast-born American publisher is planning to promote a different form of yoga in Ireland, reports Djinn Gallagher ALAN WHERRY is from Belfast, but he left a long time ago 40 years ago, he says, slightly wistfully, in a voice that hasn't lost that Lagan blás. These days he's a bigshot in the publishing industry, the head of Bloomsbury USA, so he spends a lot of time leaping into airplanes and rushing across the Atlantic to solve complicated problems. It's a stressful lifestyle, but he approaches it a calm serenity that tends to surprise the people who knew him when he was younger and wilder. Ten years ago, Alan, now 57, began to practise the esoteric art of Sahaja yoga. Sahaja ("spontaneous'') yoga is nothing like the kind of yoga you might have encountered at an evening class in your local tech. There's no need to wear a leotard or twist your legs around your neck. In fact, Sahaja yoga isn't really yoga as we understand it it's a form of meditation, where you sit up straight in your chair (with all your clothes on) and get in touch with the inner peace and silence that we all carry around deep inside us, underneath the tumult of chit-chat and shopping lists and daydreams which fills our conscious mind. "I use Sahaja yoga all day long, while I'm sitting in a busy office,'' says Alan. "It helps me to live in the present.'' As the modern world grows ever richer and faster, he says, people are becoming increasingly distracted, either chasing the next rainbow or regretting the fading of the last one, filling the spiritual void with drink, drugs and sex. "Some people live in the past, always a little bit depressed about the things that happened to them or the chances that they missed,'' he says. "Some people live in the future, thinking about the next holiday or the next job. But the only place you can live your life is the present. I have a four-year-old grand-daughter and, like any small child, she has very little memory of the past and no expectations of the future. So she lives happily in the now.'' SAHAJA yoga is a way of achieving this magical childlike state "thoughtless awareness'', as Alan calls it. The practice was created in 1970 by an Indian woman, Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi, who had lived as a child in Mahatma Gandhi's retreat centre. Born in 1923, she married a senior civil servant, CP Srivastava, just before India achieved independence. Her husband was secretary-general of the United Nations International Maritime Organisation for 16 years. Sri Mataji, a deeply spiritual woman, was meanwhile practising Sahaja yoga, and wondering how to introduce it to the rest of humanity. She began to invest her own time and money in bringing the practice to a wider audience. Those she taught described feeling a mysterious power flow like a cool breeze over their whole body, especially over the palms of their hands and on top of their heads. The website www.sahajayoga.org features lots of photographs of Sri Mataji radiating light from her head and her fingertips. You might choose to read this as a metaphor, but Alan Wherry is in no doubt about the fact that it actually happens. "Each of us has a spiritual potential, like a computer waiting to be switched on,'' he says. "That spiritual flow happens when one's personal energy connects with the energy of the cosmos. The word `yoga' is the Sanskrit for `union' '' then the publisher in him takes over for a few seconds and he adds a verbal footnote. "It's the same root as the English word `yoke' as in `yoke together','' he explains. "One's own spiritual energy is `yoked together' with that of the universe.'' LIKE Sri Mataji, Alan is devoting his own time and money to teaching others about the wonders of Sahaja yoga. When he comes to Ireland later this month, the talks will be free to anyone who's interested. Given that he'll be paying for his own flight over a fact he blithely acknowledges in response to a direct question this seems a remarkable offering on his part. But he doesn't think it's remarkable at all. In fact, he feels he can only keep what he has by giving it away. "When people charge me for spiritual enlightenment, I wonder what is going on,'' he says. "I've always worked on the basis that I've been unbelievably lucky in my life, in the way that people have helped me. And if you don't recycle that, you become a very dried-up sort of person. If I help someone, and then they go along and help someone else, that's how it works. Sri Mataji uses the image of it being like a candle lighting another candle.'' But the person hearing the message must be willing to listen. On a recent trip to the States, Alan gave a talk to a group of prisoners on Riker's Island about Sahaja yoga. "They were like schoolboys,'' he says. "They came into the room and they spent five minutes just horsing around, talking and laughing and playing with the flip-charts on the board. I waited for them to settle down, and then said: `If anyone is in this room because they've been told to come, then there's the door.''' Nobody left. After an hour and half, the prisoners most of them young black men awaiting conviction for drugs offences told him they had never before felt so relaxed. And these were guys who had used industrial quantities of some very powerful drugs. |