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In modern times, yoganidrā is generally understood to be a specific type of guided meditation performed in a supine position. This common interpretation is largely due to the success of the Satyananda Yoga Nidra technique that has been trademarked and taught by the Bihar School of Yoga. In Swāmī Satyānanda Saraswati’s book Yoga Nidra, first published 1976, he claims to have constructed this seven part guided meditation technique from ‘important but little known practices’ (2009 edition: p. 3), which he found in various Tantras.

Roughly until the middle of the first millennium CE, an important general dis- tinction opposed Buddhist and Brahmanical philosophical thought in the South Asian subcontinent: Buddhist philosophers were of the opinion that our com- mon sense world is not ultimately real, Brahmanical philosophers were convinced that it is. During a number of centuries, all Buddhist philosophers denied the reality of the world of our everyday experience, and all Brahmanical philosophers accepted it.

​Different from grasping, the gesture of greeting enables openness between the subject and object.  Greeting is an invitation to the abyss within. Meditation is a gaze within that provides an already sublimated energy to thought (Irigaray, 1991, 171). The gaze of the meditating Buddha is not divisive, or incisive, it does not grasp, but wistfully sits, open to existence as it is.  In the realization that nowhere is anything lasting, phenomena appear, exist, and then disappear; gone forever, existing only in the tumultuous caverns of memory. The decrepitude of the material realm, the impermanence of the body, is an “invariable form of variation” (Deleuze, 1994, 2).

In order to carefully assess the potential effects of meditative interventions it is of singular importance to ask whether enlightenment can be traced to specific neural correlates, cognition, or behavior.

Yājñavalkya is one of the most memorable characters in Vedic literature, known not only for his wit, insolence and intimidation – he nearly purloined one thousand cows from a group of renowned brahmins just before shattering the head of one of them –, but also for the profundity and newness of his thought.

To the uninitiated, yoga can easily seem like just another exercise fad.

Explaining the premodern Indian conception of mind to Westerners poses an interesting problem. Western popular culture tends to posit two primary centers of our being other than the body: the mind (locus of thoughts) and the heart (locus of feelings). This is in complete opposition to the Indian model, whereby ‘mind’ and ‘heart’ both translate the same Sanskrit word (chitta), for as every good psychologist knows, thoughts and feelings are inextricably linked–indeed, they exist on a continuum.

So, what is mindfulness? Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn defines mindfulness as “the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally to the unfolding of experience moment to moment.”