Sâdhaka: Ramiro Calle and the search for the yoga that existed before the gym

In 2010, at 66, Ramiro Calle contracted listeriosis in Sri Lanka and was admitted to hospital in Madrid with a prognosis of four hours to live. He survived and, a few months later, was teaching again at Shadak, the yoga center he has run since 1971. Sâdhaka, La Senda del Yoga starts from this man, one of the pioneers of yoga in Spain and the author of more than 250 books, to ask an uncomfortable question: what is left of true yoga?

The 2015 film is directed by Nicolas Gauthier, produced by SnapArt Factory, and is on the director's own channel. A narrator who presents himself as a layman writes letters to Calle as he travels to Rishikesh, Varanasi and Pushkar.

A method, not a cult

For Calle, yoga is a path of self-knowledge resting on three disciplines: ethics, training the mind and cultivating discernment. The postures are only a tool for reaching the mind. Indian teachers interviewed in the film make the same complaint: nearly everyone jumps straight to the asanas and ignores the first steps of Patañjali's yoga, the precepts of conduct, beginning with non-violence, including toward oneself.

The student must be ready

In Varanasi, a Spanish-speaking scholar explains the concept of adhikara, the qualification of the aspirant: in the tradition, each person receives the teaching they are able to hold, and knowledge cannot be bought. He also notes that yoga returned to middle-class India after passing through the West, by then with its English name. At an ashram, a doctor records the electrical activity in the brain of a swami under a vow of silence, in a room shielded against interference.

Against mass-market gurus

Calle is harsh on what he calls pop yoga: championships, contortionism and masters who preach detachment and live in wealth. He also blames the Indian teachers who took yoga to the United States to make money, and advises every student to put the master to the test.

Caveats

The film gives room to unproven claims: the age of 7,000 to 8,000 years that Calle attributes to yoga and, at an Indian health center, the promise to treat asthma, hypertension and diabetes with breathing and postures, to the point of doing away with surgery. Calle also makes his living from the teaching he defends, with a school and books.

Why watch

Because a documentary about yoga rarely criticizes its own world. Amid fire rituals, the cremation grounds of Varanasi and breathing classes, the film leaves the question Calle says he has asked hundreds of masters over his life: what, in the end, is wisdom?