This text was written for the European Yoga Congress in 2026
The Yoga of rejoicing
by Silviu Vladislav
There are four ways for meeting with emotions and feelings that are wholesome to our body, mind and soul.
The first modality consists of meeting the exterior life contexts that facilitate the experience of joy, peace, understanding and so on. But of course there is no avoiding clashes with contexts that generate grief and suffering.
The second modality consists of the cultivation of the personal archive, by reliving the good moments of the past, in order to emotionally support us against the sorrows of today. Unfortunately, we all know there is a risk of becoming prisoners of our past and of diminishing our resources for dealing with the present.
The third modality is to directly access and cultivate with or without the support of emotional imagination states of mind like peace, joy, happiness…
The fourth modality consists of sitting down in the interior space of the manifestation of joy. Like the deep sea bottom, the deep end of our being is at one with peace, joy, happiness, bliss, and that is the way.
„Yogas citta vrtti nirodhah” – the most famous stance of Yoga describes the process by synthesizing: abiding in oneself, the non identification with our mental products, the contemplation of the existential datum.
The workshops we are offering, from the Vak Yoga school founded by Yogacharya Mario Sorin Vasilescu, follow the steps of the process starting with the search and finding of the inner and outer place, the continuous abiding and revealing, the conjugation of opposites static – dynamic, silence and sound, me and the world etc and the contemplation of life, the awareness of being and the belonging to the encompassing awareness.
The workshops are targeted especially for our instructor colleagues. For the use of the training activities, the workshops are designed to offer the main typologies of the students from the point of view of the revealing of the self, in order to be useful for the instructors when they structure the appropriate yoga practice for the students’ level of openness. It is a very doable practice, starting with working the body both statically and dynamically, breathing awareness, mandalas, meditation.
