Introduction

On the side of the great pyramid at Giza, in Egypt, there is a carving believed to be thousands of years old that advises Man, Know Thy Self. In later times, the Sufis came and added And Be Free.

When the Greeks built the Temple at Delphi, they thought for a long time about a message to all mankind that they could put on the huge archway entrance and eventually came up with Come To Know Your Self. 

We find similar admonitions and notes all over the world, especially in sacred places, but also carved into trees and even on leaves in India today. 

So, throughout time, from the ancient past and in the world of today, this message, essentially unchanged, keeps coming to us from the past and to this very day, and seems to be important.

From inside of your being, there is a calling at times to understand, to know more about this thing you call "I" or "me". And none of the answers seem to provide something completely satisfactory. In fact, the deeper you appear to dig, the worse it seems to get.

Perhaps the process has become too complicated. Perhaps we just need to simplify.

We are not human "think"-ings, or human "feel"-ings, but human "be"-ings. In this, there is a clue. Answers coming from the thinking or the feeling arenas may have their use, but in the end, we are all led to a state of mere, simple Being.

Yoga is all about getting in touch with this Being - this you - and is extremely simple and direct. Except for a few distinct yoga paths, any yoga that is overly complicated and complex to you is probably not worth your effort.

Background

In Yoga tradition, when it becomes clear to you that the quest for the knowledge of the Self, and the merging of the individual self with the Divine is truly, to you, more important than worldly life - that the space between the warp and woof of the fabric of life is more important than the cloth itself - then, as a sign of your commitment to this goal, provided that the path you are going to follow is a path of yoga, you obtain a yogic name. Your yogic name can be assigned by your Preceptor, or your Spiritual (Enlightened) Friend, or a Yoga Saint, or your Guru, or in some cases, you can "choose" your name via a Divine Intuitive sense.

Because of a number of deeply spiritual reasons, prompts and insights, I came to the name of Humananda, or it came to me. Humananda is Sanskrit and means "He who finds Bliss in (the sound of the) "Hum" (of the Universe)." For me it is one of the easiest ways to "tune in" to the Oneness. If you listen, right now, you yourself can hear the "hum" all around you. And if you listen more closely, you can hear it even inside of you. For me it then becomes Me, and then I am That That I am. Hence, Humananda.

My primary Yoga Teacher is the Kavi Yogiraj Mani Finger, founder of the Integrated Science of Hatha, Tantra and Ayurveda, (ISHTA) - a Sanskrit word meaning personalized, or individualized, Life president of the Yoga Teachers Fellowship of Africa and Patron of the International Yoga Teachers Association, and the founder of the Southern African Yoga Teachers Fellowship.

Nowadays I teach Yoga publicly and free of charge from a studio in Maine to many who are curious and have never heard of yoga in any serious way, and I teach privately to the few who adore it and want to live it, whether it be Tantra (from the root Sanskrit words tanoti, meaning expansion, and trayati, meaning liberation), or Yoga in general. Send a mail or a message for more info.

So, here, in the now... let us examine this thing called "Yoga" and how it works in and for you.

The Method of my Yoga

First you should understand a few key concepts; Yoga, Advaita, and then Tantra.

What I speak of here in this place of Yoga is an eclectic mix of these concepts.

Yoga aims to fully understand the difference between your consciousness and the manifestation of that consciousness - roughly meaning between you and your world, and by having knowledge of the consciousness, become absorbed into that - and the manifestations then being understood as a part of consciousness so that all form one great Oneness. In Yoga, the senses are withdrawn in order to experience the Inner fully.

Advaita (meaning non-dual, or one) is a branch of Vedanta ("truth") philosophy. Vedantins focus on the manifestation (the world) to expose the falsity in it, and then knowing it is false, which means unreal, one is left only with the real, which is the Self, into which one then becomes absorbed, but since the Self encompasses the phenomenal world, one is never to be fooled again by the illusion inherent in phenomena. In this sense, Self absorbs phenomena into One.

Tantrics like me attempt to fully realize and understand that my very nature of being is that of consciousness - that I am consciousness - and that consciousness is all of creation and I am not separate from that - in other words, my consciousness and the phenomena are both real because the phenomena is not not-Me, and neither are they separate. I neither chase after the experience, nor do I try to avoid it. I experience it fully because to me it is at the same time worldly and Divine, and as such, to me, the experience is Bliss. In any one of these approaches, the end result is the same - it is only the paths that differ.

What I espouse here in my Yoga to you and others is a combination of these three approaches to the same goal, the "how" being dependent upon your individual orientation which you and I discover together in our open communication with each other.

Together we find your yoga and the techniques most suited to you, and then you go from there. That is about it.

Namaste.