Deep Dive

If you're looking for your soulmate, listen to this audio. Sadhguru offers some much need clarity on this sticky topic!

Are all enlightened beings free of karmic bondage? Does Sadhguru have karma? Find out in this video.

In this candid discussion with internationally acclaimed film director Shekhar Kapur, Sadhguru converses about the concept of a Guru, on devotion and the all-inclusiveness of existence. He explains that yoga is about enhancing our faculties of perception to transform the way we experience the world. He also dwells on the masculine and feminine dimensions of life without which there can be no existence.

Sadhguru goes in depth about what meditation really is and clarifies common misunderstandings that meditation is a practice.

Diwali is a festival of lights and one of the major festivals celebrated by Hindus, Jains, Sikhs and some Buddhists, notably Newar Buddhists. The festival usually lasts five days and is celebrated during the Hindu lunisolar month Kartika (between mid-October and mid-November). One of the most popular festivals of Hinduism, Diwali symbolizes the spiritual "victory of light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance". The festival is widely associated with Lakshmi, goddess of prosperity, with many other regional traditions connecting the holiday to Sita and Rama, Vishnu, Krishna, Yama, Yami, Durga, Kali, Hanuman, Ganesha, Kubera, Dhanvantari, or Vishvakarman. Furthermore, it is, in some regions, a celebration of the day Lord Rama returned to his kingdom Ayodhya with his wife Sita and his brother Lakshmana after defeating Ravana in Lanka and serving 14 years of exile.

In a conversation with bestselling author Chetan Bhagat, Sadhguru draws an important distinction between life and lifestyle and explains why we must be committed to life rather than lifestyle.

Becoming A Candidate For Samadhi - Tritonal Group DJ Chad Cisneros Interviews Sadhguru. In a freewheeling conversation, Tritonal Group DJ Chad Cisneros explores a range of subjects with Sadhguru, ranging from Native American culture, Shambhavi Mahamudra, becoming available to samadhi states, and eating the right kind of food to beat travel fatigue.

Sadhguru is asked why so many people today are trapped in a vicious cycle of frustration, misery and rage. He reminds us that the basis of our experience is within, so it is up to us to determine whether to choose misery or bliss. Though we each have an individual experience, he says, we must remember that life is happening as one big whole. This is something we need to instill in our children he says.

In a conversation with entrepreneur and speaker Alexander Muller, Sadhguru talks about taking charge of one's life and experience through Inner Engineering, and decodes the mechanics of human suffering – the only way out of which is to get off one's BWM (body, mind and world). He also talks about his vision to revitalize rapidly degrading soil in the tropical world. About Sadhguru: Yogi, mystic and visionary, Sadhguru is a spiritual master with a difference. An arresting blend of profundity and pragmatism, his life and work serves as a reminder that yoga is a contemporary science, vitally relevant to our times. Hope You Enjoy The Podcast! Thanks, Team Deep Dive

Sadhguru speaks about how people fight over their own beliefs, and how they try to impose them on others, which will inevitably lead to conflict. Religion is a method to turn inwards and should not be reduced to a set of beliefs - religion is about changing oneself. The true conflict in the world is not between good and evil, but rather one man's belief versus another man's belief. Religion is an inward step. Unfortunately, for many people, religion has just become about belonging to this group or that group. This has only brought hatred, conflict and separation among people. The same people who are together today, the moment they identify with their religions, suddenly they separate. Tomorrow they are burning each other's homes. Ten minutes ago, they did not even think about such a thing. The moment they get identified with some religious group, they are willing to fight. If they did not belong to these groups, at least they would have no reason to fight. Maybe some individuals will fight for some personal reasons, that is different. But the whole group of people has no reason to fight. This kind of mass stimulation of animal nature would not happen. Religion should have made people Divine, but it is not even making them human. They are becoming like animals, because the moment you belong to a group, you want to protect your group. That is a natural reaction in you. It is a very basic human instinct. Once you are identified with a particular group, you are always a threat to another group; you become an enemy of the others. Maybe you will talk to each other, you will be okay with each other, but the moment certain lines are crossed, it is war. We need to create a world with more inclusiveness in individuals and the institutions of society. And inclusiveness is not only the fundamental nature of spiritual processes but the very basis and goal of life itself. An inclusive consciousness will also lead to “inclusive economics,” as lack of economic opportunity is a major factor in fueling terror. If major economic powers in the world strive to create “inclusive economics,” one big incentive for youth to get into militancy and acts of terror could be diffused. A fundamental thing that has to come into education is, every school-going child should be exposed to the fundamental principles which drive the five major religions on the planet. It is the limited identities of race, religion, nationality that we build into our children which breeds legitimacy to violence. It is time that every child is taught a “global anthem” and global identity is nurtured. This is not something that you can correct once and forget about. No. It needs constant correction all the time. Just one Jesus will not do; one Buddha will not do. Many are needed. Only then there is a possibility of keeping the world in some state of sanity. Otherwise, people will continue to go to extremes. Thanks, Team Deep Dive

Sadhguru looks at why people are going through so much stress in today's world. If you ask people why they are stressed, many will say it is because of their job. However, even if you take care of their survival process and don't make them work, still people won't be settled with life. Manage yourself, not your stress Stress is not a part of your life. Stress is just your inability to manage your own system. Stress happens not because of the nature of your work. The Prime Minister is complaining of stress, the peon is also complaining of stress. In between, every other person is saying his job is stressful. And those who are unemployed also find their situation stressful. So you are suffering your job – if I get you fired, will you be joyful? No. So stress is obviously not about your job, isn't it? It is just that you do not know how to manage your body, your mind, your emotions, your energy, your chemistry – you do not know how to manage anything. You are functioning by accident, so everything is stressful. If you get into a car where if you turn the steering wheel one way, the car goes in the opposite direction, you'll be stressed, isn't it? Right now, that's the kind of mechanism you are driving. Without understanding anything about it, just by chance, you are blundering through life – so you will be stressful. Stress is not because of the nature of the activity that you are performing or because of life situations. Stress is simply because you do not know how to manage your own system. What is stressful for one person, someone else breezes through Changing the context of your life So stress is just an inability to manage the inner situation, not the outer situation. Essentially, the quality of our lives changes and transforms not because we change the content of our lives, but only because we change the context of our lives. If you look at your ability to handle various situations in your life, is it better when you are feeling very happy or unhappy? When you are joyful, you are willing to take up any number of things and do it. When you are stressed, you don't want to do even the simplest things - it sets up a different kind of momentum within you. So the first and foremost thing we need to work at is to make a human being peaceful and joyful. This will invariably happen if you do the right type of yoga. If it is done properly - because yoga is a subjective science - if it is delivered properly, it will work like a miracle and make this happen. Thanks, Team Deep Dive

How to Stop Sabotaging Yourself ? A student tells Sadhguru that whenever things are going well in her life, she starts feeling that things will soon fall apart. She asks Sadhguru how she can handle these monstrous inner voices. Excerpts from Sadhguru Conversation: Q: I have a tendency to sabotage myself when things are going really well. Can Shambhavi Mahamudra help me break this pattern? Sadhguru: So you like to play solitaire and you want to be your own opponent. There is sufficient life happening around to play with, you do not have to play with yourself. When you are by yourself, it is time to tend to yourself, to grow and evolve – not to create competition inside. If you play a double game inside of you and it manifests itself well, you will become schizophrenic. The sadhana that has been given to you has been given only after some fundamental preparation that makes you see that you are an individual. An individual means, it is not further divisible. This is just one, you cannot make two out of it; but people are always busy trying to make two out of it. You said, “I sabotage myself.” But usually, people will say, “I'm doing great, but my ego comes in.” Where is the ego? Their ego, their soul, their consciousness and super-consciousness comes in – they have become many characters in one, which is not safe. There is only one here – just you. You are the Only Factor The first and foremost thing is to establish that there is no other factor, “Everything that is being generated as an experience within me is my doing.” We have sufficiently established this in the programs that you have gone through. In India, it was common in previous generations to hear people say, “It is my karma,” which means, “It is my doing. My life is my making; it is not somebody else's making. It is not something else influencing me; it is me.” This is very important. If you do not establish this one factor, you will keep playing these games for the rest of your life. The sadhana that has been given to you is designed to establish the individual, to strengthen and stabilize the individual, so that there are no two inside; there is only one. Once this happens, these games will recede. Initially, you have to start with a commitment. No matter what, the next one year, you are going to do the practice. Whether it gives you any benefit or not – just do it. Do not look every day at “What's happening? Did this happen, did that happen?”' – No, just do it. I am not advertising for any product. Just do it, okay? Thanks, Team Deep Dive

Are you breathing and eating the right way? Sadhguru offers a Yogic perspective on these two vital aspects of life, and gives us three simple tips to stay energized throughout the day. In general, what is the connection between our body and our mind? The Yogic system does not identify the body and mind as two different entities. It is just that what we generally refer to as mind is a certain amount of memory and intelligence. Your brains are part of your body. People generally think the brain is everything just because it handles the thought process. But between the brain and the rest of the body, which has more memory and intelligence? If you look at it carefully, your body's memory goes back millions of years. It clearly remembers how your forefathers were. The mind cannot claim that kind of memory. When it comes to intelligence, what is happening in a single molecule of DNA is so complex that your whole brain cannot figure it out. In the Yogic system, there is a physical body and there is a mental body – an intelligence and memory running right across the body. The type of food we eat has a huge impact on the mind. An average American is said to consume 200 pounds of meat per year. If you bring it down to 50 pounds, I would say 75% of the people will not need antidepressants anymore. Meat is a good food to survive if you are out in the desert or the jungle. If you are lost somewhere, a piece of meat will keep you going, because it provides concentrated nourishment. But it should not be a daily food that you eat when there are other choices. There are many ways to look at this. One aspect is that animals have the intelligence to know in the last few moments that they are going to get killed, no matter how cunningly or how scientifically you do it. Any animal that has the capacity to express some kind of emotion will always grasp when it is going to be killed. Suppose you come to know, right now, that at the end of this day, you are going to get slaughtered. Imagine the struggle that you would go through, the burst of chemical reactions within you. An animal goes through at least some fraction of that. This means when you kill an animal, the negative acids and other chemicals are in the meat. When you consume the meat, it creates unnecessary levels of mental fluctuations in you. For most of those who have become mentally ill, the illness is not pathological but has been cultivated. Such a large percentage of people cannot be mentally sick unless we are somehow culturing it within our social fabric. If you put people who are on antidepressants on a conscious vegetarian diet, in about three months' time, many of them will not need their medication anymore. We have seen this with many people who have come to the Isha Yoga Center. Thanks, Team Deep Dive

Sadhguru gives a Yogic perspective on health and explains how Yogic practices are focused on bringing balance to the energy body, which naturally brings physical and mental health. When it comes to a chronic ailment, whatever may be the ailment, the root cause for it is always in the energy body. Your energy body functions the way it functions for various reasons. It may be because of the kinds of atmospheres you live in, the kind of food that you eat, the kinds of relationships that you hold or because of your emotions, attitudes, thoughts and opinions. It may also be because of certain external energy situations that disturb your internal energy. In some way, your energy body is disturbed which will naturally manifest both physiologically and psychologically. Once this one layer of the body—the energy body—is disturbed, the mental body and the physical body are bound to be disturbed. Actually it becomes a doctor's concern only after it becomes a medical problem. Till then it is not a doctor's concern because there is no physiological manifestation. Unfortunately, medical science understands only disease. It does not understand the roots of health, as to where it comes from and what the basis of health is. If you are a diabetic, sugar is not the problem with you. It is just that your pancreas is not functioning properly. As an emergency measure you reduce the sugar intake because in the Allopathic system of medicine, they have no other way to activate your pancreas, so this is the only measure they have taught you—“check your sugar every day and take a little more insulin”. The Allopathic system is symptomatic in treatment—the doctor looks at your symptoms and gives you the treatment. Allopathic system is a fantastic system for any infections. Allopathy is the best thing as I see for anything that comes to your body from outside. But it does not offer any solution for the simple ailments which man is creating for himself from within, like diabetes, blood pressure, or migraine headaches. Modern medical science only offers to manage the diseases and never really talks about freeing you from those diseases. There are whole systems of medicine and so many kinds of specialists to manage diseases within certain limitations. A lot of money and time is being spent on just managing those diseases. It is just like people talking about stress management. People want to manage their stress, people want to manage their diabetes, people want to manage their blood pressure. It is ridiculous. This kind of foolishness has entered, simply because they have not understood the fundamentals of how their own life energies function. In yoga, if there is diabetes, we see it as a very fundamental disturbance—diabetes is not taken lightly as a disease. We see that the fundamental structure of the basic body is being disturbed. That is why diabetes happens. And it is different in each individual. For each person, the level of disturbance and the type of disturbance that happens in each system is very different. So it needs to be handled individually. However, irrespective of what the disease is, yoga only aims at balancing and energising or activating the energy body. The basic premise in yoga is that if your energy body is in full flow and properly balanced, there can be no chronic disease either in your physical body or your mental body. Diabetes will go because we are not treating the disease as such, we are seeing disease only as a manifestation of the disturbance that could be existing in the energy body. So if people are willing to do a certain amount of sadhana to balance and activate their energy body, they can definitely be free of all chronic ailments. Connect with Deep Dive on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/reachdeepdive

Responding to a question on coping with job loss during the pandemic, Sadhguru offers a profound perspective and reminds us of the most precious things which are still with us – our life and that of our loved ones. Few other tips by Sadhguru for a fulfilling personal and work life: MANAGE YOURSELF: What you identify as stress, fear or anger doesn't happen because of what's around you, but due to your own faculties not taking instructions from you. If your mind was taking instructions from you, it would create pleasantness, not unpleasantness. It is your inability to manage your own system that causes this problem. Assume control over your own being, and everything will be fine. GET THE CONTEXT RIGHT: If somebody's life is happy, it does not mean that he is doing something differently. He does the same things you do after he wakes up in the morning, or before he goes to bed at night. But somehow, his life seems magical and beautiful because of the context in which it is being seen. The quality of your life does not depend on how simple or complex it is; it depends on how you look at it. BE ACTIVE, BUT HAPPY: You do not have to be ambitious to be incessantly active; it works even if you are joyful. If there's no stress in what you're doing, you will be willing to be active any number of hours per day. Being driven is overrated; you function best in an environment of freedom and intelligence. DON'T LOSE PERSPECTIVE: Stress is the natural by-product of human beings losing perspective of what this life is all about. Their psychological process has become far larger than the existential process. That is the fundamental source of all suffering. Everything around you may be going pretty well, but just one wrong thought or emotion could destroy everything. MIND YOUR THOUGHTS: Your mind is society's trashcan. Everyone who passes by stuffs something into your head. You have no choice about what to take, and what to discard. If you take another look at this knowledge, you will realise it's just something that is expected from you; it has nothing to do with who you are. APPRECIATE REALITY: Life is about making the most of your reality, knowing it absolutely, and experiencing it just the way it is. There's no real need to distort it. If your thoughts and emotions seem important, your whole attention will focus right there. But that is a psychological reality, not existential. Stress is not showered upon us, it is manufactured. DON'T PURSUE HAPPINESS: Today, we seek happiness so vigorously that we threaten the very existence of our planet. Don't be in pursuit of happiness; instead, know how to appreciate and express it. If you look back, you will find that the most beautiful moments in your life were those in which you were expressing your joy - not seeking it. TRANSFORM WHAT'S WITHIN: The quality of your life is not determined by the clothes you wear or the bank balance you hold. Rather, it depends upon how peaceful and joyous you are inside. People deprived of basic needs may be physically miserable, and therefore in need to rectify their circumstances. But the needs of most others are not decided by what they have, but how they are at that moment. GET YOUR MIND TO RELAX: Let's look at the various factors that influence us from dawn to dusk. If you did not sleep well last night, even your morning could be bad. As it's the level of relaxation that makes all the difference, it is necessary to keep your system relaxed in a way that activity doesn't take a toll on it. You could be physically exhausted, but it wouldn't stress you out in any way. Simple yoga can help.

Sadhguru looks at how our personality is self-created, and how we would be at out best if we could consciously wear the mask of personality and take it off as the situation demands. The self cannot be nurtured. It is so absolute that it does not need nurture. It cannot be transformed into something else, because what you call the self is also the basis of creation. If you are talking about your personality as a “self,” your personality does not need nurture either – it needs dissolution. In the East, the goal has always been to dissolve the personality. This is the fundamental difference between the Eastern and the Western approach. he self as the basis of creation does not need any nurture. If you refer to your personality as a “self,” this does not need nurture either. Hope you enjoy the podcast. Drop us a voice message: https://anchor.fm/reach-deep-dive/message

Sadhguru explains how fierceness and compassion are the qualities of the feminine, embodied by Linga Bhairavi - the ultimate woman.

Sadhguru talks about the three fundamental qualities of the Divine Feminine, and explains how we can make use of Navratri, or the nine auspicious nights dedicated to Devi, to hasten our spiritual growth.

Sadhguru talks about the importance of being in the right company and ambience for one's growth. He also talks about how being in the right place in life is not a matter of sheer good fortune, as many believe, but a matter of talent that one has to mature into. "Once your mind becomes absolutely still, your intelligence transcends human limitations."

Listen to some simple and effective life hacks to improve your mental health. By following these practices you'll gain balance in your life gradually. The practices have been followed by millions of followers of #Sadhguru around the planet.