“The Humble Teacher Does Not Preach What He Does Not Practice”

He is the great Spanish yogi for all and one of the main ones in the world. He has traveled more than a hundred times to India to interview other yogis and sages and look for one more piece of himself.

“I always say that I received these self-development techniques as a gift and, when you receive such an important gift, the logical thing is to pass it on to others,” he explains.

Interview with Ramiro Calle, the great popularizer of yoga

─Are they tricksters who offer answers for everything?
-Exactly. The humble teacher does not preach what he does not practice, but all these gurus who go around the world doing international tours as if they were rock stars, they actually have an inordinate ego.

They preach humility and are the most arrogant, they preach detachment and are the most attached. Fifty years ago the great psychiatrist Carl Jung was prophetic when he was in India and said that yoga there had become a business.

The human being has to realize that nobody can change the world and nobody is going to open the chakras or take out the kundalini energy in a few hours. In authentic yoga there are no shortcuts.

─ Is practicing yoga two or three times a week not enough?
—It serves, and a lot, but if you persevere in it and complement it.

In addition to the yoga class, you have to have a yogic attitude, because yoga is a vital and existential attitude, and you have to bring its fruits and those of meditation to daily life.

─Is the great transformation of consciousness still pending?
-Yes. In the 1970s and 1980s, we had a huge illusion for the New Age, but the human being has not changed because it has gone towards the gross instead of the essential.

There can be a change of consciousness if we apply the techniques seriously and this depends on the will to heal and humanize people. True yoga accelerates conscious evolution.

“The teacher makes the disciple and the disciple, the teacher”

─Have you met yet?
“There are many levels of meeting.” We are made of layers that we have to self-penetrate.

It is important to know our traits, complexes, traumas, psychic holes and emotions. But then you have to dig deep, beyond the ordinary mind, to where the mind is still, where the ego is suspended and we have a different experience of being. This is what is transforming us.

I am always working on myself, and what has never failed me is the unshakable faith in the teachings that the most enlightened beings of humanity have given us: Buddha, Lao-Tzu, Pythagoras, Mahavira or Jesus. It is the spiritual map that I follow and expand.

─Who is your spiritual master?
-Me. The journey to be made in life is the “journey within”.

Genuine teachers give us guides to reach the true teacher, who is called satguru , the inner guru who should not fail you. A true teacher is the one who knows that if he makes you advance a section, he also advances it. The teacher makes the disciple and the disciple the teacher.

─Neuroscience is validating what these teachers said, such as the effects of meditation.
“Yes, they were all light years ahead.” The Buddha spoke 2,500 years ago of the subatomic units, the kalapas . And he did not know it with a particle accelerator, but with what he lived inside himself.

These people who were dedicated to the exploration of the body, mind and emotions, were the first practical psychologists: they investigated not in other people’s minds, but in their own, to transform it.

Ramiro Calle is a yoga teacher, writer and popularizer. He began to write at the age of 15, practically when he received the first teachings on spiritual subjects and hatha yoga, which for more than 40 years he has taught in Shadak, his center in Madrid.

Today he is critical of certain successful conceptions of yoga: “They confuse it with a sport, a religion, a dogma, a cult of the body …”.

“There are many forms of yoga, but there is never dogma … It is a spiritual discipline of self-development and self-knowledge, of improvement and perfection of the human being for psychosomatic well-being.”