The Sirens’ Song: Staying Faithful to Your Spiritual Practice
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The Sirens’ Song and the Mast of Observance
How to persevere in your spiritual practice
when you are alone, without an ashram or a community
How can you remain faithful to your spiritual practice when you live it alone, without an ashram, without a community or a native religion to support it? Drawing on more than fifty years of meditation and life as a disciple, Hans Yoganand ji offers a candid observation: life is gentler, clearer and more joyful when you remain in the practice, and every distraction draws you back toward the sirens’ song. A satsang on perseverance, inner peace and preparing for the passage of death.
I find the Observance of the sadhana astonishingly simple. That said, it has been more than fifty years since I received the Revelation and began observing this sadhana. I belong to another generation, another time, when observing a sadhana and following the âjnâs of a guru was commonplace, accepted; I would even say fashionable.
And then I lived in an ashram: first in the ashram where I was initiated, then in France, in ashrams that were not of my own lineage, but of a closely related one. Since there were no others in France and I wanted to continue my ashram life, I applied, I was accepted, and I was able to carry on my life as a disciple in ashrams. I am seventy years old today, and I have been living this life of Observance, practice and devotion for more than fifty years; for many, that is a whole lifetime.
So when I say that the Observance is so easy, I do not reproach those who find it difficult for finding it difficult. Times have changed; you do not live in an ashram; you do not have what the Buddha called the Sangha, one of the Three Jewels of his teaching, that is, the community of those who lived with him and practised together.
In those days, things were different. Those who wanted to follow the path (it was not called that; for the Buddha, it was the Dhamma) had little choice: they entered an ashram, a temple or a monastery, and took vows of chastity, poverty and obedience. They had, if not the master always close by to give them darshan and satsang and to inspire them, at least a kind of mahatmas around them, great souls who had spiritual authority to guide the Observants, the renunciants.
You, however, are alone as an initiate; you know no others. In my ashram, when we wanted to go to the doctor or the optician, we always went out accompanied by another disciple, as in Catholic monasteries: when a nun or a monk who has taken vows and lives in enclosure goes out into the world, another monk accompanies them to encourage them, to help them stay close to the essential, to the Holy-Name, to the Holy Spirit. You cannot do that. So it is not easy for you to practise all the time, to be motivated all the time.
That is why there is the satsang I give you regularly. This satsang is there to motivate you again, to replace the caring community in which you might have lived, in other times and under other customs. You probably live alone or with your family, in a place where there is no temple, no ashram, no church. You can contact me, even if it is not your habit. I offer it to you: you can talk with me by video, speak freely about anything, tell me your doubts, your questions. You do not do so, and I do not hold it against you in the least, believe me; but I still tell you that you could, should the need arise.
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So, what can motivate you? If this were a religion, a native religion as Christianity is in Europe, Buddhism in Asia, Hinduism in India or Islam in Muslim countries, you would have no trouble observing the sadhana, the doctrine. You would have learned it young, you would have had the example of those around you, your parents, your neighbours, all or almost all of whom would observe the sadhana: they would meditate, practise the Holy-Name, listen to satsang, seek to be in service. You would have followed their example, and it would be less difficult; it would even be easy. You would not need to be motivated.
So, what can motivate you to observe this sadhana which, though simple, is no less demanding? It demands that you commit yourself to the Observance, that you overcome your inertia, your lack of appetite for the absolute. What can motivate you?
Listen, it is certainly due, once again, to my seniority on this path, but I tell you, and make of it what you will: with the experience of the Observance that is mine, and the experience of life in general that every man and woman of my age has, I can tell you that living, existing in this world while observing the sadhana is better than living in it without the Observance.
I see it clearly when I am less aware of the Holy-Name and of Grace. Let me reassure you, it happens every day, several times a day, each time for a very short while, but it happens all the time, because we have within us a magnet that pulls us downward; a psychological, existential, physical, human magnet. I do not know whether this is peculiar to me or whether it is true of all human beings, of all men and all women, but I can tell you that when I am no longer so much in the Holy-Name, because I am distracted, because I am thinking of something else, like everyone, I do not like at all what I am living at that moment. I do not like it at all. I am then like those sailors who listen to the sirens’ song, set their course toward the source of that song, run aground on the breakers, on the jutting rocks, and meet their death there.
It is suffering, confusion, unease, poor self-image, doubt, fear, anxiety. Nothing to bang my head on the floor about or to take antidepressants for, but I listen to everything: what is said on the news, the reasons people put forward, what my thoughts and emotions dictate to me. I get drawn into debates which, like many debates, are vain; they serve no purpose, which is the very definition of vanity. Debates that cannot bring me anything positive. I realise it very quickly: I come back into the Holy-Name, I come back to the practice, I come back to strict Observance, and then I find again the gentleness and the inner peace of the Holy-Name, of the practice, of the Holy-Name technique, of the Nectar. The scales fall from my eyes; my gaze loses its dark veil.
You know, it is like an old painting whose varnish has yellowed and which has lost all its colours. You clean it with cotton wool, a little water, a little light oil, you remove all the old varnish, and there it is: the painting regains colours, a depth and a meaning it had lost a very long time ago. Time, cigarette smoke, chimney smoke had darkened it; it had lost its beauty. That is exactly it.
When I leave the Observance, the practice, if not the awareness of the Holy-Name; when I leave even just the practice of the Holy-Name, or merely that of the Nectar, or service, to do the things that interest me and to which I am attached, then the colour and the fragrance of existence, life within this existence, are no longer as beautiful, as flavourful, as timeless, as joyful as when I am in the Observance, in the awareness of the Grace that is given to me at every moment, of that fundamental harmony of the Holy-Name which reigns over everything. And if it reigns over everything, it reigns first within me: it is within me that I find this harmony. Of course, I also see it in the things of the world, especially in natural things such as trees, nature, animals; I see this beautiful harmony in people who are close to it, as when I go to a monastery, for example.
If you have not been practising, observing, for a long time, you cannot have the experience I have; you cannot necessarily have realised straight away that it is better inside and worse outside. And if you do not see that it is better inside and worse outside, what drives you to be inside? It is, after all, less complicated for the mind, for the false-ego, for tamas, to be outside than to be inside, even if being inside is simple. But you know, human beings often lean toward the dark side of the Force: they lean toward procrastination, inertia, confusion, ideas, concepts, attachments, desires, and it does not take much of a push, when you lean toward all that, to fall into it. It is already so difficult to straighten the mind so that it stays upright and no longer leans, and then to make it lean toward reason, toward harmony, love, inner peace!
And since you do not have many years of experience behind you, nor experience gained within an ashram or a monastery, it is very hard for you who are alone. So all I can tell you is that I encourage you. I tell you: all of this is true. And where does all this lead? To the happiness of true life.
And then, you know, at the end of life, something is going to happen. If you are not ready when that thing comes, if you are not trained to recognise it and to lean toward it, who knows where you will go then, who knows what suffering, what anguish you will go through? Training yourself through the Observance in true detachment also means knowing how to let go at that moment. If you are too attached to life on Earth, to what you know, and also to those you know, that moment will be lived as a tearing away, as a tragedy, as a place you will not want to go. The more you resist, the more you will suffer, and the less it will be what it is meant to be: a lovely passage, of infinite gentleness, toward the light.
So, if only for that, if only to train yourself for that moment, practise, observe this sadhana, so as to know this gentleness that lies beyond birth and death. And I say to the disciples, to the oldest Observants: it is important, it is important, it is drawing near.
Hold on, cling firmly to the mast of the Observance so as not to yield to the sirens’ song.
If you have any questions, please write here: madhyama.marga@gmail.com
Originally published at https://observance.over-blog.com on October 31, 2026.
