Sadhguru’s ‘Inner Engineering: A Yogi’s Guide to Joy’, his first book for western readers, was launched in North America in this month. His book release tour in North America was planned with an event in Boston on September 17 at Back Bay Events Center.
In this book, Sadhguru provides instructions on how to improve our experience and the quality of life to create joy in our everyday life. He presents a refined guide to self-empowerment based on the teaching and principles of traditional yoga.
According to him, this system helps create a framework of inner stability in those who practice it and become engineers of a joyful life. Sadhguru’s insights and his teachings are different. As per Sadhguru, “Joy is a rare visitor in most people’s lives.”
“The intention of this book has been to make it your lifelong companion”. He says joy is not any elusive spiritual goal but it is simply a background setting that is needed for any aspect of life to unfold magically and wonderfully. This book is based on his personal experiences rather than any theoretical approach.
Sadhguru is the founder of Isha Foundation, headquartered in the hills in southern India. It is a volunteer organization that guides individuals to have a spiritual awakening, thus creating joy in their lives. In this book, he discusses some significant practices such as meditation, diet, ways of living, physical exercise, and various branches of yoga and also suggests various means or tools or Sadhana to achieve them. Sadhguru says that practicing these tools enhance our experience, perception, or ability to receive life, just as it is.
He further states that paying attention to our inner nature transforms the quality of our life in significant ways. He mentions both comical and inspiring stories to explain his ideas. He suggests some exercises in simple terms that would help create a more joyful life. Most of the tools presented in the book are very down-to-earth. However, sadly, some aspects of the tools are abstract and lead to ambiguity in the minds of readers.
This book is divided into two parts. Part one lays out maps of the terrain of series of fundamental insights and part two presents more practice-oriented engineering based on those insights. This part includes significant insights into five chapters namely: 1) When I lost my sense, 2) The way out is in, 3) Design your destiny, 4) No boundary, no burden 5) And now, yoga.
According to Sadhguru, these insights refer to the perspectives that emerge as a result of awareness.
Part two includes three chapters: 1) body, 2) mind, and 3) energy that focus on how to architecture the physical, the psychological, and the energetic ideas based on exercises given in the sections of ‘Sadhana.’ He says that these practices provide a chance to everyone to test these hypothesis in our daily living and thereby improve one’s experience and the quality of life along with spiritual awakening, thus creating joyous life for oneself.
This book is engaging and gives many short useful tips but at the same time, it seems that the book is highlighting the experiences of life of Sadhguru that helped him in achieving a shift in his consciousness/ own awakening. Although there is some helpful information in the book, most of the examples are given from his own life.
Sadhguru in his book, ‘Inner Engineering: A Yogi’s Guide to Joy’ presents a philosophical and practical introduction to the power and understanding of yoga. As he states that, “Yoga is not just acrobatics or metaphysics, but it is an empirical science that makes you the master of your own destiny, and engineer of your own inner bliss. In short, this book emphasizes some useful strategies that are intended to achieve a particular goal of obtaining joy in life by being a dynamic participant on an ecstatic journey inward.
India Post News Service
