Kriya Yoga Acharya - Savitri

Acharya Savitri - Profile

I’ve been asked to write a profile about myself, my relationship with kriya yoga and how it has affected my life.

So many things have changed around me since I practice kriya yoga that it’s difficult to know where to start, many times I asked myself if what I do now or the projects that I have would be the same without the subtle hand of this Guru whom we call Babaji, and with time you don’t desire anything else but surrendering to his feet and let his divine will to act through you. When you feel this happening you don’t know how to thank it, doubting many times if you really deserve this privilege.

I’m going to explain with a few words who is Savitri, what she does, where she lives and a few things more.

Suddenly, one first of October, I was born in this body, a long time ago, half century more or less, I was born woman, maybe because of this my age is indefinite, I opened my eyes in Barcelona although I spent my childhood and youth in Sant Feliu de Guixols, a little town beside the sea en the Costa Brava, when I was 17 I went to Barcelona to study, I studied medicine, at that moment more to please my parents than for a inner vocation, as daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter of doctors, it seemed that I hadn’t other choice.

From this point we will jump as to today. My actual job is family doctor in the public medicine, together with the practice of homeopathy and nutrition in private consultation. Sometimes I write articles for magazines about health and self-help subjects.

I live in Girona, in the northeast of Spain, close to the border of France, I have a partner and two sons.

The discovery of kriya yoga

As all that are in the spiritual path, I’ve always been a searcher, Catholicism didn’t persuaded me, maybe because of its little convincing way of explaining things, or because of its emphasis in the fear of God instead of the love for God, at least this is how I perceived it. Although I was a reader of St. John of the Cross and I was and still I am fascinated by his Spiritual Canticle and by St. Therese of Jesus and her Mansions, but something was missing, now I know that it is the practical part of spirituality.

I have to say that thanks to yoga now I’m much closer to Christianity and Jesus, because finally I understood the real meaning of his words, it is not by chance that all saints and sages of history give the same messages.

One day “the book” felt in my hands, you know which book I mean, of course, “Autobiography of a yogi”.

And this is how I fully entered in kriya yoga, what attracted me the most was the fivefold path, I found extraordinary that it embraced equally Hatha yoga, Pranayama, Dyana, Mantras and Bhakti yoga.

About 10 years after, and after a regular practice and attending several seminars of first, second and third level, the Hatha Yoga training and pilgrimages to India, I was asked if I wanted to be an Acharya. I accepted delighted, I was pretty excited to be able to transmit the techniques of kriya yoga, and still I am.

It is wonderful to realize how kriya yoga helps many people to improve their lives, not only to the students but also to the people around them.

Actually I’m giving most of the seminars in Sant Feliu de Guixols, and one or two times a year in Alicante and in the Dominican Republic, but I’m open to give seminar wherever I am called, as long as there is a small group and I could coordinate the dates.

Yoga day-to-day

I integrate kriya yoga in the daily work whenever is possible to benefit others, as a family doctor I have a good chance to do it, I use this chance to teach some of the allowed techniques to receptive patients, this is the case, for example, of the asthma pranayam, I have confirmed that those who suffer from asthma that practice it regularly have so many less crisis of asthma, and they require many less medication or no medication at all.

I have also the chance to teach techniques of meditation and relaxation to people with depression and stress, arterial hypertension or heart conditions, and see them improving, there are many reports that show their effectiveness.

In my place of work we are trying to organize meditation groups to different health problems, but basically for hypertensive people, so we could do in our health area a comparative study between those who practice meditation and those who don’t, with the idea of later including more diseases, probably when this article be published some other groups will be formed.

Yoga in the jail

As activist of Amnesty International, NGO that works to protect human rights in the entire world, I was asked to give some lectures to the inmates about human rights, especially regarding domestic violence.

Jail at first seems to be a world apart, and those who are there different people, but it is not like this, nobody is good at all or bad at all; in most of the people who are in jail, beliefs, subconscious habits, experiences, education and social levels are different to what we consider “normal”. Often they have a minimum or nothing of education, very often fundamentalist beliefs, one after one traumatic experience, and social marginalization, but they are persons like us, with the same fears and desires, the same attachments and the same aversions.

Because of this, it is not difficult at all to use the chance of the lectures to introduce basic concepts of yoga, love, compassion, respect, and the recognition of subconscious habits and the awareness of their own emotions; these notions are not only rightly welcomed, but also understood.

Sometimes they argue between them or with myself, and we can hear statements like this: “Don’t you respect “the cricket” (nickname of some inmate) because you are afraid of him? So, you have to respect everyone just because they are persons, not because you are afraid of them.”

At the end the result is that many offered themselves as volunteers to collaborate in what they can, collecting signs (between them or they relatives) for several campaigns of Amnesty International, as for the soldier children of Congo or the commerce of (curiously, only a few of them sign for the campaign against death sentences, they think that it is better to die than to spend all your life in jail.

Other activities they do are handicrafts, like carton moneyboxes for the fair trade shops, and some who only go to jail to sleep at night help us, as volunteers, when we do some action on the street.

Needless to say what a satisfaction this means to me, and how grateful I am to the constant inspiration of Babaji.

Savitri

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