As we made our way to meet David Sye, one of the foremost yoga teachers in the West, on Wednesday 31 January 2007, I became aware of a great exaltation of spirit.  When I had phoned him a few days before to arrange an interview, I had been absolutely delighted that he could make himself available at such short notice and that he seemed so genuinely enthused about meeting us.  As soon as we saw him, his engaging personality and openness dissipated any awkwardness we may have felt.  It became obvious that we were in the presence of someone with an indomitable adventurous and resilient spirit, an innate sense of curiosity and wonder and an infectious exuberance for life.  We all sensed his incredible aliveness and we were all witness to the ease with which he immersed himself totally in the present moment, paying total attention to what was going on. This was an encounter that promised to be meaningful, entertaining and thought-provocative.

There were no less than five of us (and from no less than three different continents!) that day sitting around a small table in a Spanish bar in the heart of London to talk about yoga, under the bemused eye of a young staff baffled by our request for soy milk…It became clear, right from the start, that David Sye is no conventional yogi but one who walks on the other side of conformism, and I laughed inwardly at the thought of how many other misperceptions and stereotypes would be challenged that morning! Once again, I was reminded how an insidious tendency for superficial categorization had prevented me from seeing things for what they truly are.  One doesn’t need to be in a temple or in an especially dedicated place to practice, live and breathe yoga or simply talk about it.  To limit yoga to conform to certain received ideas is definitely not yoga.

There was nothing scripted in David Sye’s words; they had the raw spontaneous quality of those who speak from the heart, giving them authenticity.  He answered all our questions with an uncommon mix of wit, integrity and soul-searching honesty, giving us a glimpse of his deep interest in metaphysical and spiritual matters, and exhibiting simultaneously an analytical and intuitive mind.  He walked us boldly through his personal life journey, sharing stories and revealing insights which have been integral to his ascent into consciousness and have allowed him to integrate the traumas of his early life.

“Yoga is my life but it is not all my life” he told us.  Like many others, he came to yoga for health reasons.  Before yoga, he had no life.  With no fewer than 12 tumours in his colon, the future looked bleak.  The profound soul work of cathartic rebirthing (connected breathwork and focused awareness) led him to journey back into the subconscious wounded places of his body and mind, releasing self-sabotaging patterns. “The body has a memory.  The body is a composite of what has gone in the life.  Everything is written in the body” continued David Sye. It is the unresolved issues that are stored in our cellular memory which prevent us from moving forward.  Until the stagnant energy is cleared away, we stay stuck in a given pattern and keep on recreating the same experience over and over again and we cannot expand in consciousness. To heal, we need to reclaim all the fragments of ourselves which have become dissociated so that we may become whole again.  Anything that is suppressed, repressed or denied - consciously or unconsciously - interferes with the flow of energy in our bodies and manifests as illness.  As people, we are fields of vibrating energy and healing occurs when harmonic resonance is restored in our own vibration. It is through accessing and using the power that lies within us that we are able to heal ourselves. David Sye explained how he had found the ancient science of using sound to promote healing very beneficial for him.  The Tibetan yogis, he furthered, use the vibrations of the human voice whilst holding specific points to stimulate the flow of energy and restore harmonious balance.  Every organ in the body vibrates to a certain sound and the colon, for instance, vibrates to the sound of the letter P.  David Sye also mentioned his profound interest in energetic kinesiology and the potentials of using intent in a certain way to bring about transformation.  Kinesiology enables us to by-pass the conscious mind to tap directly into the wisdom of our higher self.  It allows us to bring our inner and outer world into finer alignment and serves to test the objective truth of a statement.

Illness awakens us more deeply to the preciousness and precariousness of our lives.  By experiencing the transitory nature of each moment, we become more aware of our own physical finiteness.  Knowing that our time is limited and that the time of our death is already set, David Sye added, we should seek to make the most of the time we have on earth and enjoy it to the full.  Our lives are what we make them to be.  What really matters is not how long we are here for but how intensely we live, what we do with our lives. “Life is blighted by two things: extraordinary ignorance and fear” explained David Sye.  Those who have been close to death report how radically their attitude to life has been changed.  In the face of death, all falls away, the expectations, the pride, the fear of failure, etc., to leave us with what really matters.  Ill health enables us to go within and find out where we are resisting love, why we feel enable to give and receive love and accept the truth about ourselves.  By developing a greater sense of self-acceptance and self-forgiveness, we can integrate all the different parts of ourselves and we can become peace itself.  Everything that happens to us in this life is a gift to us even if we do not see it in the first place; everything has a potential growth to it.  We are here to learn from the lessons we are given; this is what makes life interesting, challenging and fun.  Life is a great adventure.  We need to cultivate an element of “hunger” and “foolishness” in everything that we do.  We need to keep a zest for living, a sense of play and curiosity and a willingness to learn from the mistakes we all inevitably make. 

The way we nurture ourselves is our responsibility. “We must not trash the body too much”.  The body is the temple of the soul and should be treated and respected as such.  David Sye talked about the importance of maintaining the body in optimum working order through the choices we make as regard food, exercise (asanas), cleansing and purification techniques (pranayama, meditation, kriyas - including vasti kriyas -, massage) and sleep (even if this means taking a nap in the middle of the day because the body needs it).  He also stressed the necessity of taking time out, time off, to relax and enjoy life and spoke about the importance of discipline – not discipline imposed from without but self-discipline motivated from within.  David Sye explained that he gets up before dawn every day for his personal practice and that it is always a special moment for him to reconnect with himself and be still.  “Yoga is about feeling good about ourselves.  It enables us to go above the conscious ego, the ego that is programmed by society and to bust out.  It’s the greatest high I know without taking recreational drugs” he continued.  There are so many of us living our lives by accident, stumbling in and out of relationships, venturing into jobs, hoping to make money and stay in good health, forever searching for a sense of purpose and direction to become alive and find fulfillment only to realize (sometimes too late!) that we need to wake up first before our life can be a life of purpose.  We need to shift from soulless living to soulful living.  How long do we have to live until we realize that our ladder is propped up against the wrong wall?  How long do we need to understand that we are worshipping the wrong values, living meaningless lives, chasing someone else’s dreams?  We have silenced our own inner voice. “Finding out who we are should be intrinsic, there’s no need to go to India to find out who we are!” commented David Sye.  We need to find out what it is that we are really aching for and then have the courage to follow our own heart.  Once we know what resonates with us, we can align the way we live our life with our purpose.  Living authentically means being free to choose to act and think in accordance with our conscience, it means following our own truth, using the gifts we have been given to serve our purpose. 

The universe is undergoing a time of major transition and great spiritual awakening.  We are now on the verge (some say it has already started) of a collective leap in the evolution of consciousness and an increasing number of people report feeling the effects of a higher vibration of light and experiencing more insights. This wave of light that is touching people’s hearts comes with the realization that spiritual growth can be a wonderful and joyful journey instead of a struggle! There now exists the possibility to move to the next evolutionary stage of mankind – from Homo sapiens to Homo spiritus as is experienced by the current shift in consciousness, pursued David Sye.  Revolutionary research led by eminent scholars is bringing evidence that we are not separate but part of an infinite continuum and that all and everything is interconnected.  “We can choose to play in it or not”, he added.  “The term Homo spiritus refers to the awakened man who has bridged the evolutionary leap from physical to spiritual, from form to nonform, and from linear to nonlinear. The awakened man realizes that it is consciousness itself, which constitutes the core of the evolutionary tree in all its seemingly stratified and evermore complex expressions as the evolution of life. Thus, life transforms from the relatively unconscious linear to the fully conscious nonlinear, and Creation reveals itself to be the ongoing unfolding of the Unmanifest becoming Manifest. The capacity to reach the condition or state classically called Enlightenment represents the fulfillment of the potential of consciousness in its evolutionary progression." – David Hawkins.