Matri's Blog: Matri — from the eco-yoga portal

Every Saturday, as the light goes long and gold over a valley in New South Wales, a small fire is lit and a sound begins to move through the air that is older than any language spoken on that continent. At the Middle Pocket Yoga Shala, in the hills of the Australian north coast, people gather at five in the afternoon around a square of flame, and the valley fills with the reverberation of Vedic mantra — the same syllables, in the same lineage of the Bihar School of Yoga in Munger, that hundreds ...

The boy was in the river when the crocodile took his leg. It was an ordinary morning on the Pūrṇā at Kaladi, in the green of what is now Kerala — the same river the child had bathed in a thousand times, the water warm and brown and unremarkable. And then the jaws closed, and the current turned red, and the small body was being pulled down into a death that had no argument in it. On the bank his widowed mother, Aryambā, was screaming. She had already buried her husband. She had one child, this st...

Before the house wakes, a woman unrolls a mat in the one square of floor that is reliably hers. For the length of this hour — sometimes it is only twenty minutes — no one asks her where she is going, or checks her phone, or narrates back to her what she “really” meant. She breathes. She feels her own feet on the ground. And somewhere in the third or fourth breath, a quiet, almost forgotten sentence surfaces from underneath everything that has been said over her: I am still here. This is where th...

Of all the teachers who emerged from the Indian tradition in the twentieth century, Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950) is perhaps the most difficult to categorise — and, for that reason, the most instructive. He did not found a school. He did not prescribe a method. He sat in silence on a mountain in South India for five decades, and what he transmitted was not a technique but a direction: inward.

The question he taught — Who am I? — is not a philoso...

At the edge of a village, before the day’s heat, an old woman walks to a peepal tree that has stood longer than anyone’s memory and ties a red thread around its trunk. She pours a little water at its roots, presses her palms together, and murmurs a name older than any scripture: Pṛthvī Mātā — Mother Earth. She is not performing a quaint ritual. She is doing what her people have done for four thousand years: greeting the ground beneath her feet not as real estate, not as a resource, but as a livi...

The Yoga Vāsiṣṭha is one of the longest and most elaborate treatises on Advaita Vedānta in the Sanskrit canon — a vast dialogue between the sage Vāsiṣṭha and the young prince Rāma, composed to address the deep existential despondency that overtook Rāma after a period of pilgrimage, when the vanity and suffering of ordinary life became apparent to him. The text covers the nature of existence, the illusory nature of the world, the ...

As narrated by Paramahamsa Swami Satyananda Saraswati during satsang at Bihar School of Yoga, Monghyr. May 1979.

The Himalayas, land of ice and snow, of high barren plateaus and green flower-carpeted valleys, have always been dear to my heart. There the air is so pure and invigorating, the spiritual vibrations so strong, that higher meditative states dawn easily and spontaneously. Having been born in the Himalayas, I used to experie...

A child in a kitchen in Pondicherry watches her grandmother grind ginger. The grandmother does not look at her hands. She is reading a letter on the counter while the mortar moves in a small, perfect circle, six strokes one way, six the other, the same rhythm her own mother used. The child will learn this rhythm before she learns the names of the streets outside the house. Years later, in a city she has never been to, she will reach for ginger and her hand will already know how to move. She did ...

In Chicago in 1903, a lawyer named William Walker Atkinson — already five years into his second life as a writer of the American New Thought movement, already a publisher of small spiritual magazines, already a man whose office mantle held more incense than law books — sat down to write a slim book under a name that was not his. He called himself Yogi Ramacharaka, took the voice of a teacher of the Indian breath-disciplines, and put on paper, for an English-speaking reader who had almost no othe...

In the temple town of Palani in Tamil Nadu, on a hill above the Vaiyai River, there is a small black-stone deity of Murugan that the priests will tell you was not carved. It was made — moulded — from a substance called navapāṣāṇa, nine herbal-mineral compounds bound together in proportions known only to the siddhar who designed it. The siddhar’s name was Bogar. The tradition holds that he lived for many hundreds of years, that he travelled to China and returned, that he composed seven thousand v...