Yoga’s Four Paths to Enlightenment
As one of the most successful popularizers of classical yoga, Swami Vishnudevananda (1927–1993) exemplified the value of study, meditation, dedication, and peacefulness. After studying with the great Swami Sivananda in India, he traveled at his Master’s behest to the West, where he taught classes and trained yoga teachers, wrote The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga, and established yoga education and outreach centers. Swami Vishnudevananda named this worldwide network of Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centres for his teacher.
Today’s Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centres offer classes in yoga, with practices geared toward developing physical, mental, and emotional health. They also focus on the timeless philosophy anchored in principles of universal love, wisdom, peace, and non-violence. Through following the classic tradition handed down for thousands of years and transmitted through Swami Sivananda to Swami Vishnudevananda, the centers promote the Four Paths of yoga: karma, bhakti, raja, and jnana yoga.
Karma yoga is the “yoga of action,” which teaches us how to serve selflessly to make positive changes in the world around us. Virtuous action is its own reward and is an act of worship in itself.
Bhakti yoga is the path of devotion and the workings of the heart. It is the pathway on which we transform our earth-bound emotions into focus on a higher purpose through a thorough attachment to God that brings about a higher state of consciousness.
Raja yoga is the yoga of meditation, involving the transmutation of physical and mental energy into strong spiritual energy. This path makes use of physical yogic postures (asanas), as well as breath control, concentration, and self-mastery to lead us to a state of true self-realization.
Jnana yoga offers an intellectual approach to enlightenment, focusing on spiritual evolution as articulated by the ancient Vedanta. The practice of jnana helps students to differentiate between reality and unreality, the important and the trivial, the eternal and the transitory, as they work toward achieving oneness of consciousness with all Being.
