Yoga is the fountain of youth - it reverses the aging process. I often say to students (half-joking) that for each year of yoga you practice, you become younger by a year. A few days ago, by this calculation, I reached year 0.

I started practicing at age 28 1/2 and last week reached the age of 57 - so I have been practicing yoga for half my life and by my calculation should have regressed to the age of early infancy.

Some things cannot be reversed but I am certainly much healthier, stronger, more flexible and perhaps more importantly, my inner feelings of energy, positivity, peace, non-attachment etc. have all been increasing, leaving me with a feeling of agelessness.

It takes time to put theory into practice because practice helps one to understand the meaning of theory and how to apply it in specific circumstances in real life. It is only in the last few years, that I have begun to feel that my understanding of yoga and ability to practice have properly matured.

And also, although one may repeat to oneself and others the spiritual laws, the mantras of transformation, it takes time for them to properly stick and become real. So perhaps, rather than year 0, I have reached somewhere around my 10th year.

In any case, age 10 was what I was aiming for.

From the age of 6 to 10, I was extremely fortunate to have been surrounded by beautiful unspoiled nature. I used to spend hours every day playing by the river, climbing trees and running through the forest. It was an extremely happy time in my life. My experience was vivid. My mind was bright, my energy was unlimited and I believe that I often experienced some taste of blissful samadhi.

Then around the age of 10, as my intellect started to develop, I began to read my father’s newspaper and about man’s capacity for evil - I read about war, famine, murder etc. and became exposed to the extent of human misery. Up until this point I had been innocent, but now my eyes were opened. As if over night, my beautiful experiences in nature vanished, and now, instead, my experience became dark, anguished and constrained (Perhaps a bit like the fall of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden).

A new sense of reality began to dawn, but this reality was grey, limiting and alienating and felt much more unreal than vibrant life I had experienced in my earlier years. I felt a deep distress at the loss of the vital, shining authentic life I had previously experienced.

This catastrophic event in the life of a child, when one transitions from innocence and imagination to the dawning of adulthood and maturity has been identified in neurology as a moment of massive synaptic pruning. While the child's brain is open to a huge array of experiences and new learning, with the onset of sexual maturity and the development of the intellect, there is a significant reduction in the number of neural pathways as brain function becomes more efficient, channelled and limited.

This was the beginning of my search for meaning, and though I did not find yoga until 18 years later, all along, my goal was to rediscover this early childhood experience of vivid reality and bliss.

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I received many congratulations on recently sharing the news that I would become a parent again. Although, it is the convention to congratulate parents on the birth of a child, and I understand that this is an expression of love, support, joy, in reality, congratulation should come with a job well done. Congratulation should come when the child leaves home and has been successfully reared. When the parent is able to graduate from the parenting stage of life and move to the next stage.

The classical Indian view is that there are four periods of life - four ashramas. There is youth (a time for education), middle age (a time for raising a family and earning a living), there is retirement (a period for giving back to society, being a grandparent and elder) and then a period to retreat to the forest and pursue spiritual practice exclusively.

I was thinking - my children are adult, it will soon be time to retire and then go off to the forest to exclusively pursue spiritual practice (as usual, I was a bit ahead of myself). And then, unexpectedly, I discovered that I would become a parent again. Even though my aspiration was to find my cave to go and meditate in, I realize that I had not graduated from the parenting stage of life! I still have another 20yrs to make up! And probably much longer before I qualify to find my cave. I evidently still have a lot to learn in this stage of life.

When you meet another human being, the inclination is to resonate with them. Sometimes, if the person is toxic, does not hold our values or is troubled by suffering, we try to resist this resonance. But an innocent child can elicit the purest resonance. We can try to be an educator, an example, a guide - show our maturity and wisdom, or we can allow the child to be the guide, to lead us back to unconditioned being, innocence and purity. Spending time with children is a great opportunity to be young at heart, to feel ageless.

If you think about it, the youngest incarnations of humanity are the most evolved spiritually (have had the most incarnations) - they come with faculties to manage the future. We are not their educators, they are our guides. And so, now I surrender to another few decades of education.

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It is generally thought that a human being is a finished product at 18 or earlier. His or her character, profession and future is pretty much set for life. We mature until we become adults, continue to gain skills for a few years and then start to decline before we reach the mid-point of our lives.

But the beauty of the search for meaning is to recognize that the only way to gain true understanding is through personal evolution. As Vyaasa says: “Yoga can only be understood through yoga.” In other words, yoga and the nature of reality can only be understood through samadhi, and samadhi can only be experienced through a transmutation of the mind. This can take a lifetime or lifetimes to achieve.

If we are just thinking about material development - strength of the body, fitness for child bearing and bread winning, without an interest in the evolution of the inner soul, then we are set for a depressing decline through middle and old age.

However, if our goal is deep knowledge, spiritual evolution and true peace, then our growth can continue until the very end. If our goal is realization, we continue to grow and evolve and if our goal is material security then our capacities decline with age.

While the body ages and the mind matures, the spirit is ageless. Maturing of the mind, allows it to become transparent, allows the spirit to shine through it, to manifest more fully.

Maturing is not to become wiser in a material sense, it is to become more aware of what we do not know, to be comfortable with our ignorance and to allow others to show us what is true. Wisdom is not intellectual maturity, it is maturity in living life, in living what is wholesome and true, not in facts but in what makes us truly human.

I found my way to India exactly on my Saturn return at age 29. Saturn is regarded as the outermost planet in classical astrology and therefore the arbiter of time. Time is determined by the rotation of the planets around the sun - beyond Saturn is the infinite. So Saturn governs big cycles in life. It takes 29 1/3 years to return to the same position in the sky.

Now as I am about to enter my second Saturn return and the clock has been reset to family life and parenting for another 29 1/3 years, I have to accept that my life and future is in society, not in isolation. The meditation cave is not in the mountains but within the human body, within the heart, within family life. The cave is a metaphor for the skull - meditation takes place within the cave of the skull - not the external cave.