About Swami Shantananda As Jani Baker: BA (Philosophy) Melbourne Grad Dip Marketing Monash Grad Dip Arts (Social Science) Monash Postgrad Dip Health Psychology (La Trobe) Trained in the traditional discipline of Yoga under Swami Shankarananda Trained as a Yoga teacher by Joy Spencer Trained as a Meditation Leader by Ian Gawler. As Swami Shantananda Received Sannyas Feb 2009 (ie, “became a swami”) Spiritual Director: Australian College of Classical Yoga Affectionately known as Mataji Yoga has been a constant in Mataji’s life since she was sixteen, after being enthralled by an introduction to Yoga in a women’s magazine of the time. After leaving school, she found a yoga teacher wherever she was living as she grew up and moved around, with only occasional breaks. However, for the first seventeen years, all she knew of “Yoga” was exercise and relaxation. None of her early teachers offered anything else – perhaps because they themselves knew nothing else. Early in the 1980s, she discovered the richness and the depth of what Yoga really is – a discipline of mind and body that has been practiced continuously for over 4000 years, intended for the transformation of limited experience into the oneness of universal consciousness. The realization arose that Yoga is properly a meditative discipline which also includes some physical practices, but of which the focus is not and cannot be merely physical. Trained in the meditative discipline of Yoga by Swami Shankarandana, of Shiva Yoga, and trained to teach Asana and Pranayama by Joy Spencer, she also accepted meditation leader’s training by Ian Gawler, and became the founding Secretary of the Gawler Foundation. Over the years, a profound shift of consciousness occurred. It seems to her that name, personality, the whole of the “personal melodrama”, is but the tip of the iceberg, and underneath the superficial processes of the mind, there is a quiet awareness which is of the nature of reality itself. Such a shift brings with it a resilience and robustness in everyday activity, and a contentment which is constant whether the situation is pleasant or unpleasant – “happy for no good reason”, as her guru Swami Shankarananda might say. When he offered her sannyas, the deepest commitment of the individual to spiritual life, she gladly accepted. The word “swami” indicates that the individual puts aside the personal self and seeks nothing but unity with universal consciousness – “Shiva” in our tradition. The Australian College of Classical Yoga trains teachers in the understanding that Yoga is the practice of conscious awareness. Our teachers become Yogis, not gymnasts.
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