Yes, do your hatha yoga, very good for the body. It is our responsibility to take care of the body. It has been given to us by God to use in His service, take care of it. So He gave us the system of hatha yoga, etc. All kind of yoga lifestyles He gave us to make it so our material existence can be as good as it can, live in harmony with nature, with each other so that we are not always struggling with all of this, so we can easily focus in goal, in the right direction.
Now you may ask, “What about my relationships I have now with my husband, my wife, my children, my friends, my country? Am I supposed to abandon these? And just see them as in the way?” No, that is not the message.
When we establish this loving relationship with God, along the way we will have obviously increased our understanding and vision of life. And I will develop what is called spiritual vision and I will see other people as spirit souls, not just the bodies, “Oh, this is male, female, attractive, unattractive, this is the dog, this is the cat.” This is material vision. I will see spirit souls in human bodies: male, female, spirit soul in a dog body, bird body, tree body. And I will understand they have the same needs that we all do. And I will want to help them spiritually. I want to help them spiritually.
More and more today we don’t care about anybody. If we do care about somebody, it’s just a very small group of people (my family, my friends), very isolated. So it becomes more and more impersonal.
But as we evolve spiritually in our relationship with the Supreme Lord, we start wanting to help others, not only materially but spiritually. But now I have the understanding of how to do that, I know how to do it. That is all the science of bhakti yoga.
So what is this doing? This is taking myself out of the center of my life and putting God in the middle and others around. I develop more and more a serving consciousness which is again my true nature. So my life is increasingly brighter, not dark but very bright. And therefore the relationships can be more and more spiritualized.
So for the true yogi everything in his life is spiritual: his relationships, his actions, his motivation, his goals and ultimately his love. It’s all spiritual. And this is the perfection of life.
Can you imagine the whole world with people like this? But there is such a world, it is the spiritual world. So if I become like this, I go to the spiritual world when I leave this body. But truthfully speaking, even before I am already there. So this is yoga, this is the yoga of relationships.
And remember relationships are part of life. So it’s certainly a value to understand what a relationship should be and work toward that. But we don’t start at the bottom and work up, we start at the top and work down. Some people add the idea, “Oh, first I will make my relationships with everybody I know perfect, perfect, perfect, perfect and then somehow later somewhere I will worry about God.” It doesn’t work like that.
So the message is: first understand and work on the relationship with the Supreme Lord and all the other ones will be automatically included. And that is bhakti yoga.
And the activity that enhances this more than any activity is this mantra meditation, hearing and chanting God’s names. This is what He has taught us. He says, “This is what I want you to do.”
Therefore obviously if you want to develop a relationship that is favorable with a person, you try to do what they want you to do. So if we do this, then we’ll get amazing results.
And, of course, in the cultivation of these relationship we want to try to do it from the heart. The sincerity.