KAIVALYA YOGA
Raja - Advaita - True Meditation - Jivamukti - Ashtanga - Nutrition
Stefania Fallo
"Karma is a gift that God gives us, offering us the opportunity to learn, through experience, how it feels when suffering from a particular situation; suffering teaches us to understand and approach all beings" (S.Gannon- &D. Life
Yoga entered my life more than 20 years ago, when a friend of mine, to encourage me to overcome a serious bereavement, invited me to take the Hatha Yoga courses of a teacher who conveyed to me a pleasant sense of peace and balance. I learned from that very moment to awaken consciousness and exercise became a source of perception and careful analysis for me. Yoga, in my youth, remained a side activity, while I concentrated my energies towards disciplines that I was most passionate about. My focus was mainly on Fitness and the Body Building, passions I cultivated while doing different jobs, until I became my main profession. These were years when I had imposed a rigid and very hard discipline, but that had an almost meditative effect on me: the concentration needed during a workout emptied my mind from messy thoughts, shifted my attention from the outside to the inside, deep perception of every muscle and nervous fiber. The result of these years of commitment led me to realize that my body was the only tool I had to get to the deep knowledge of me, and that what I experienced firsthand was useful and necessary to guide those who relied on me as a trainer.
Movement, healthy eating and concentration were the basic rules of my lifestyle.
During these 20 years I had never abandoned Yoga, which I practiced alone or following different classes and teachers in a disorderly manner.
Since 2010, once again, i have once again questioned the painful personal events to be faced, but I have questioned every supposed truth, letting the sense of the divine resurface in my consciousness and support me in change.
Starting from the selfish need to find in myself hope, a more lasting happiness and a deeper sense of our being on this Earth, I then devoted myself to meditation and self-analysis, to specific readings of biblical exonerates, history of religions, metamedicine and neuroscience. I took the First and Second Levels Reiki, began to experience Yoga more subtly, directed my consciousness towards a more spiritual approach to life. Also in the profession, I shifted my interest towards holistic and postural disciplines, studying and enabling myself as a teacher of the Pilates method and Functional Postural Gymnastics. For Yoga, my training was not as simple: I practiced over the years with many Asthanga and Hatha Yoga teachers, receiving good technical lessons from them, but I could not find a course of qualification that would meet my needs of continuous research and deepening. While continuing to practice Svadhyaya on my own, I was looking for a pure teaching that could support me in a coherent Sadhana that could take me to the heart of this millennial discipline. With the entrustment, in 2015, of Hatha Yoga classes in the sports centers where I worked, the search for a solid and consistent training had become even more necessary.
To paraphrase a Buddhist saying, it was at this point that the student was ready and the Master I was looking for appeared. I met Enrico Quintavalla in September 2018, when he was organizing his first T.T. on the Island of Bali. The integrity of his Sadhana and the peculiarity of his method immediately impressed me. It was thanks to Enrico that I began to read and study Yoga Sutra, whose translation and interpretation personal and unfiltered for the first time put me in a position to face radical choices of ethical and profound transformation that I had not still considered until that moment. The spiritual approach that animates Kaivalya Yoga was that extra touch that I couldn't find in other T.T. that I had tried to attend. I followed some teaching of Enrico between Bologna and Parma, until fulfilling the dream of participating in an intensive 300-hour T.T. in August 2019 in the silent and enchanted place near Dolomiti Mountains.
During the TT I went through all the aspects that characterize Kaivalya Yoga. First of all, Movement: the first rule of moving one's body in every possible way elevates the intimate nature of man, which is not made to live the sedentary life to which modern Society habituates us. Secondly, Nutrition has played a pivotal role in both physical and mental-spiritual support. High-Raw Vegan, which I didn't follow before TT, has been invaluable in supporting the physical and mental activities. Every day mental lucidity, good mood and physical energy increased even though the practice was quite intense. In addition, the purpose of Kaivalya Yoga is to promote a diet as pure and ethical as possible, predispose the body to permanent health and defend the world from harmful and violent eating habits. The third in-depth element during the retreat was Adyashanti's approach to True Meditation, which allowed me to discover an easier way to engage in meditation. The more I found out I was inside the rules of the Kaivalya method, the more enthusiastic I was.
Movement, healthy eating and meditation... Wow... but it was just me!!! it was my way of life!
I am grateful to Enrico, who was not only my Master, but is always present friend and guide; I am grateful for his pure teachings and the conscious Sadhana shown to me. And I am grateful to the profession that I have chosen to perform, which allows me to connect with the hearts of the people who rely on me, and I feel like I am doing something useful, good. It happens, as happened to me first, to approach Yoga when the body asks for care for a pain of the soul: here, I found a reason in pain and I hope to be able to help others as my first teacher unknowingly helped me. My work puts me at the service of those who seek support in the change of body and soul, makes me an instrument of the realization of an intention and channel of passage, as the Reiki also teaches. It also allows me to give a joyful and loving part of me and at the same time gives me a wonderful sense of fullness, just as the popular saying says that "everything we do comes back to us". After the T.T. all this became even clearer: improving myself and being a credible exemple allows me to work the good of Humanity, my wellness psycho-physical is the wellness of my students and of the people around me. Just as Enrico did with me, which was the example I was looking for.
Today I still teach in gyms the sports disciplines for which I am enabled, including Yoga, of course; but the long-term study and planning of my future years sees the teaching of Yoga as the perfect fulfillment of my long research and preparation. Starting from the 2019-2020 season, side by side with the other activities, I started my first stable course of Kaivalya Yoga at the ALMA Studios Center in Bologna.