An Interview with Isha

Wisdom: Can you please set the stage for our exploration by explaining how the Isha System works?

Isha: What the system is about is that it takes us inward. The principle aspects are the facets and when we think the facets, we create a harmony between the right and left hemispheres of our minds and take our bodies into a profound level of rest. When this rest takes place, the body starts to heal and as it heals, we are elevating the vibration of love. Everything that is vibrating at a low frequency, starts to fall away. It’s not just physical, but also emotional, like if we have a lot of stuck or controlled emotions or if we have a lot of thoughts based in fear. They cause a matrix in our intellect and we start to see our world through the perception of what has gone before. The facets and system start to clean anything that is not vibrating at a level of joy and peace and love. It’s like what we had when we were young and lived in joy for no reason. It gets rid of the strain and garbage and baggage and we come back to a place of innocence. When we experience love consciousness, we start to live in the moment and perceive through new eyes, instead of eyes that are jaded with past experiences. We start to see things as they are instead of how we are.

Wisdom: What creates the garbage in the first place?

Isha: When we are children, we are natural. We feel our emotions. We speak the truth and have an experience of consciousness as who we are. We start to learn that there is something wrong with us, that we need to change, that what we do isn’t appropriate. We have principle shocks that separate us from the experience of trust and innocence. We start changing ourselves and our personalities. We start lying and putting on masks. We realize then that the love is outside. We start accommodating ourselves in order to receive that love and start to build up resentments. We pretend we’re happy when we’re sad and we do what we don’t want to do. All of these stresses and fears start to accumulate in our bodies and that joy and peace becomes suppressed with all that rubbish. We start living in the surface level of our minds, like everything begins to be outside. It’s not real. It’s a human experience, sure, but there is something much more than that. We can have this incredibly beautiful human experience without all the preoccupation and fears, by coming back to our natural essence and being more in the present moment.

Wisdom: How did you come to create your work?

Isha: Through a lot of suffering. I went through everything and I’m like every person. I thought that my happiness was on the outside. I had the capacity to achieve what I wanted, but I could see that whenever I did what I wanted, there was another moment in the future when I was going to be happy. I had an extraordinary amount of control, because I was always afraid of losing something or being abandoned. I built my house on a very fragile base and needed so much control to sustain it. It started over a period of a few years, but I wanted to live without fear and not be scared that someone would leave me or constantly have that underlie everything. I could see that I didn’t love myself. I didn’t even know what that meant. There was a part of me that thought that there was something wrong and that I had to prove that I was ok. I got sick of that. People would say to me "Oh, you need to love yourself more", and then I would say "What does that mean?" and no one knew in reality. When I started expanding my consciousness and seeing myself, I started to see what that was. I had so much internal rejection and I started to embrace every aspect of myself. Humans judge themselves so severely. We have this idea that we are meant to be saints. Until we heal and embrace our humanity, we can’t experience that freedom and the ideal person we want to be because there is too much fear.

Wisdom: In one aspect of my work, I come in contact with people who find it challenging to truly love the man or woman in the mirror. I tell them that they are not their diagnosis, addictions or history. They still don’t grasp that concept. How would you explain this to someone whose beliefs are so entrenched that they think their worth is based on someone else’s perception of them?

Isha: It is impossible to explain it. They have to see it. The things based in fear, they start to see "Oh, that’s not me. That’s my mother’s perception." They start to see for themselves that they are not this person they created; they are much more than that. I tell my students that too and they go inward and start to heal. "That’s not really me. That’s something that I created because I was withholding the truth." They can see that everything they built is based in fear. They can recreate themselves as they want to be, which are basically, the aspects that they love about themselves without the fear based aspects that they reject. It’s very hard to understand, isn’t it. People have to experience it.

Wisdom: Is that truly the choice we face; between love and fear?

Isha: That is the choice, yes.

Wisdom: How is the kind of love you talk about, contagious? How can we help spread it?

Isha: Love has behaviors and unconditional love behaves in certain ways. Unconditional love naturally is transparent, integral, joyful and full of praise and gratitude. It is contagious, because love naturally moves to a higher frequency and we are naturally drawn towards that. People who have found their own freedom and unconditionally love themselves, are like magnets. People come and say "How do you have that? What did you do to get that?" There are things that you can do to start experiencing that amount of love. I train literally thousands of people at my seminars and I’m just a normal modern woman with all the traumas and dramas, the same as everyone else. I’ve gotten to that point with the expansion of my own consciousness. People can see it. The heart resonates with it. When someone finds their own life, it is an inspiration to them; it’s like "If she can do it, I can do it." Then someone else does it and someone else does it and it’s a snowball effect. It’s incredible, really. All of humanity is opening for this, yes? I know that down here in South America, it’s phenomenal. I walk into high security prisons and I’ll have a thousand men practicing the system and crying because they realize "I can love myself. I’m not bad. I did something that didn’t serve me and didn’t serve other people. I have a possibility to make a new choice now. What I did is not who I am." I guess it’s about each individual finding themselves and other people see that.

Wisdom: Can the Isha System be used to overcome addictions as well?

Isha: Absolutely. I teach people with addictions. I had addictions. They are where we hide. The mind becomes so frantic. We look for a way to be calm. We look for a drink, we look for a lover or we look for a cigarette or some of us eat. We have addictions to things that make us suffer. When we don’t love ourselves, our addictions are very important. When we start to find internal consciousness, we start to love and nurture ourselves, like you’d nurture a baby. You’d start to be important and then go "Oh no, that doesn’t serve me and think I can go out and get terribly drunk." The next day you feel terrible and think that it doesn’t make you feel good about yourself. Even the need to be right can be an addiction. We fight to be right and have our way. It all causes us to suffer. The other thing that the Isha System does, because it is elevating the consciousness so rapidly, it also elevates the central nervous system. The body starts to reject things that are toxic, it’s like it can’t tolerate them, because the system starts to become very clean. Anything that is toxic that we could have sustained before, we can find very disagreeable. For instance, I couldn’t drink anymore or even dream of having a cigarette. It’s something that came from inside.

Wisdom: How would you describe the facets in a simple way? I read the book and I had a hard time with the words sticking in my mind. Is it just through repetition that people grasp them?

Isha: Initially, when you first start to practice them, there is a little bit of resistance. Humans have a resistance to the idea of perfection, because we perceive something as fundamentally wrong. As you start to do that, the sentences start to break down the resistance and take you into an experience of consciousness. When you do it with your eyes closed, you start to experience it rapidly, because the facets work with the thoughts. It’s not like you’re trying to resist anything. You find that once the little bit of stress starts to leave, you start to anchor profoundly into that peace whilst using the facets. It becomes quite simple and they become stuck in your mind. You find that you are thinking them automatically because they grab the coherency between the right and left hemisphere. The mind enjoys them because it gives your mind a chance to rest instead of that constant right hemisphere and left hemisphere are always discussing and not expressing consciousness.

Wisdom: Can you share what the facets are?

Isha: People really need to read the book to know what to do with them. This is groundbreaking for me since I’ve only ever taught the facets to groups of people. I’ve never done it in a book. When I teach, people spend a couple of days with me and I explain everything in great detail. In the book I have explained it in great detail too. I wished to touch as many people as possible in this way to elevate consciousness. I’m hoping it’s clear and that people can understand it easily. The actual practice of the system is what gives the result. You have to practice the facets. The other aspects which are more advanced are natural by-products of the expansion of consciousness. The simple aspects, apart from the practice of eyes closed and eyes open, are the drinking of water and exercise and then later, removing masks, being transparent.

Wisdom: When you had the intention of writing the book what was your dream that it would do?

Isha: The Isha System had such a big impact in South America and Mexico. If I have a dream, I want to teach everyone. Even though I teach lots of people at once and I have trained 50 teachers down here who are always traveling, I knew I was limited in the amount of people I could touch. My dream is that everyone start experiencing consciousness and that the world realize that our differences are superficial. The truth is the love, the abundance, that unconditionality and innocence that is in all of us. I want everyone to come back to that union. I realize now that I experience that, how hard my life was. We live with so much control, stress and fear. I probably wasn’t an extreme case. I want all humans to basically love themselves exactly as they are instead of constantly criticizing themselves.

Wisdom: And from that place, it’s easier to love other people.

Isha: Absolutely. Once we love ourselves unconditionally, we’re not taking. We have the tendency to have love like contracts: "I give you this, but I expect in return..." When we are not loving from a place of fear, there is no mask. It’s genuine and you can hold other people in their greatness. You can allow them their freedom instead of clutching and controlling in case something happens. We can’t give what we don’t have.

Wisdom: What do you think keeps people stuck in believing lies rather than truth about themselves? For example, it might be easier for someone to believe that they are worthless, broken or wounded, than to see themselves in their greatness.

Isha: To step into our greatness takes courage because you have to have responsibility and the ultimate responsibility is loving ourselves. We love to blame other people for why we’re not happy. It’s my mother’s fault, my father’s fault, the children’s fault, the president’s fault. When we embrace our own greatness and start to realize: "I created this thing, I’m responsible for it and we’re not separate from anything." When we create separation from unconditional love, something strong happens. For me it was my adoption; that extreme abandonment. It could be a divorce or someone dies. Fundamentally, all humans have a belief system that they don’t deserve to be loved and that’s the separation we have to heal. I am the Love. There is always an aspect that thinks "I don’t deserve that much love." That’s why we choose people who can’t love in return and the usual dramas we create in our lives.

Wisdom: I enjoyed the stories you shared in the book. Do you find that people learn best through anecdotes?

Isha: I like parables because we’re like children. When we’re young, we are free children and when we are old, we are frightened children. We love stories and we learn that way. When I was teaching in the high security prison in Mexico, one of the things the journalists who were there wrote was "incredible to watch this woman standing before 900 hardened criminals telling them a children’s story and they are there with wide eyes, listening." It’s true, because we can relate to stories.

Wisdom: If you could write a prescription for peace in the world, what would be written on it?

Isha: Expansion of consciousness. If we want union in the world, everyone has to come back to that experience of unconditional love of self. World peace is a responsibility of each individual. We have been waiting for someone to do it for us and it’s never worked. It has to start with each of us taking the responsibility of healing and loving ourselves.