ACCOMPLISHED POSESince I began practicing asana and meditation at
age sixteen, I must admit, I have missed only eight
days. For two of those days I was very young and
wanted to see how it felt not to practice. For
another couple of those days I was laid up with
hip surgery, and for a couple more my son was in
the hospital. But besides those eight days, I have
practiced yoga every day. As a result, I can go into
samadhi at any time, in any place. If I couldn’t,
what would be the point of doing fifty-five years
of yoga?
Samadhi is difficult to describe, but it is the
state of having a still mind, of turning your
senses inward. When you reach samadhi, you are
in the now, where there’s no form of duality—no
separation between you and everything in the
universe. There is no time, no form, no good or
bad, light or dark, right or wrong. When I teach
people to meditate, I teach them how to move
their consciousness toward samadhi. So I like to
say I teach people to feel nothing.
I can find samadhi on the bus, in the middle of
the city, wherever. I was interviewed for a doc-
umentary a few years ago, and the interviewer
asked me, “You can just go outside on the street
and feel samadhi?” I said, “Let’s go.” We went
down to Fifty-eighth Street and sat on a curb
outside the Bloomberg building. People were
walking by. For about two minutes I was unaware
of New York City around me. I could have sat
there for much longer, but I didn’t want the crew
to feel like they had to keep filming me.