Preambul

We have also noticed the persistence and even exaggeration of all kinds of awkward aberrations that are naively presented and accepted as an authentic hesychast tradition (due to ignorance) in many countries, in many situations.

As the authentic and valuable information about the real hesychasm has been lacking in our country, we offer a vivid proof, that we consider very instructive regarding the hesychast practices of a young man who visited Mount Athos and who has consequently practiced them under the direct guidance of a hesychast monk – Father Seraphim. Those who are intelligent and intuitive and who easily go beyond the dogmas’ chains, that fossilise and ossify, could draw on their own some constructive parallels between yoga and authentic hesychast practices (by reading this testimony).

Translated by yoga teacher Gregorian Bivolaru
After Jean-Yves Leloup, “Notes on Hesychasm”

And thus, an authentic initiation in hesychast inner listening began for the young philosopher. It was pretty obvious to him the first indication referred to a greater stability. The advice was not spiritual, but physical: how to sit more stable.
 
Sitting in a stable and firm position as a mountain means, among other things, “putting on weight” or, in other words, perfectly and profoundly relaxing to feel as if you “sink” in the ground. During the first days, the young philosopher found it hard to sit for so long without moving, like a rock, with the legs crossed and the pelvis a bit higher than the knees (he discovered that was the posture that gave him the most stability).

Translated by yoga teacher Gregorian Bivolaru
After Jean-Yves Leloup, “Notes on Hesychasm”

Thus, from that day, the young man began to learn how to bloom...Meditation means, first of all, a stable position and this is what the mountain had taught him. But it also means “orientation” and this is what he was to learn from the poppy: to cyclically rotate after the sun, from dark to light. Furthermore, he had to transform in energy the whole “sap” of his being and after that, with its help, to aspire towards this.
 
Sometimes, this orientation towards good, beautiful, light, truth made him blush like a poppy. Like God’s “wonderful light”, it was the light of an open look accompanied by a smile, waiting for a certain scent from him…he also learned that the poppy always had its scape straight in order to orient itself better, so he began keeping his spine straight.

Translated by yoga teacher Gregorian Bivolaru
After Jean-Yves Leloup, “Notes on Hesychasm”

The young man came near the sea. Retrospectively thinking, he realised he had a more stable posture and a straighter spine. What was missing, then? What could he learn from the waves’ tornado? Soon, he noticed the wind was getting stronger. The sea’s flux and reflux became stronger and that awakened in him the longing for the ocean. It could not have been a coincidence the old monk asked him to meditate like the ocean, and not like the sea. Where did he know about the long hours he had spent in the north of the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded only by night, when he had learned to breathe in the rhythm of the waves? Breathe in, breathe out … then: I am breathed in by God; I am breathed out by God. I let myself completely carried by the breath, as if I were carried by the waves…

Translated by yoga teacher Gregorian Bivolaru
After Jean-Yves Leloup, “Notes on Hesychasm”

Father Seraphim said one day to the young philosopher: “The stable position, the consequent orientation towards God’s light and profound respiration, naturally rhythmic as the ocean do not form hesychast meditation, yet. You must learn to meditate as a bird now”. And taking his hand, he took him to a small cell where two turtle-doves had built a nest on top. Their gleeful chitter delighted him at first but ended up annoying him. He thought they chose to whisper sweet love whispers exactly when he prepared to sleep.

The young man, baffled, asked the monk about the meaning of all those and for how long the comedy would continue. The mountain, the poppy and the ocean were all right (even though, someone from outside could ask himself about the connection between those and Christianity), but to come to those languishing birds as meditation master, that was much too much!

Translated by yoga teacher Gregorian Bivolaru
After Jean-Yves Leloup, “Notes on Hesychasm”

Father Seraphim’s teaching was natural and therapeutic. As Filon from Alexandria said, ancient monks were actually “therapists” (“healers”). Before leading someone to true illumination, their role was, first of all, to cure human nature fast and to completely harmonize it so that it could receive God’s Elevating Grace that did not contradict nature, but restored and fulfilled it. 
 
The mountain, the poppy, the ocean, the bird taught the young man to re-become aware, to resume life’s different live levels that human beings knew once or, in other words, the different kingdoms that created the Macrocosmos: the mineral, the vegetal and the animal one. Man – as anyone can realize looking carefully around and inside him – has lost contact (resonance) with everything that is good and divine in Macrocosmos: the rock, the plants, the animals and this bad state triggered discomfort, diseases, insecurity, loss of love, unhappiness and anxiety.

He became a foreigner in his universe due to that great sin. Profound meditation means, first of all, spontaneous and sincere praise of the universe, as Saint Parents said “all things and beings learned how to pray before us”. Man, as a being privileged by God, is the only location in the universe where praying becomes real and totally aware of itself.

Translated by yoga teacher Gregorian Bivolaru
After Jean-Yves Leloup, “Notes on Hesychasm”

Father Seraphim came to give advice to his young student less and less often. He telepathically felt the progresses the latter made in both arts of meditating and praying. He even saw his disciple with his face in tears a couple of times, meditating as Abraham and arduously praying for the people: “Lord, I humbly beg Your Divine Grace; otherwise, without Your help, what would become of them?”
 
One day, the young man came especially to talk to Father Seraphim. He asked him: “Father, why you have not spoken to me about Jesus yet? What was His prayer, His form of meditation? I know they only talk about Him in all High Masses and church services. In the prayer of the heart, as “Filocalia” describes it, His name is often invoked. Why you are not telling me anything about Him?”

Father Seraphim seemed very troubled, as if the former asked for the revelation of his heart’s most intimate secret. The higher the received divine revelation is, the greater the humility it needs to be transmitted further. Father Seraphim confessed he did not feel that humble to communicate such a secret: “Only the Holy Ghost can teach you that. Nobody but the Father knows who really the Son is and nobody knows who the Father really is but the Son and those to whom the Son decides to reveal Himself”. (Luke, 10, 22).

Translated by yoga teacher Gregorian Bivolaru
After Jean-Yves Leloup, “Notes on Hesychasm”

Father Seraphim’s young disciple stayed a couple of months more on Mount Athos. Jesus’ simple prayer often impelled him in endless and bottomless abysses, bringing him on the verge of a real ecstatic elation: “I am not the one living now, but eternal Jesus lives in me” he could say as Saint Paul. When he was overwhelmed by those states, he had a continuous delirium of humility in himself and the desire of interposing in others’ favour at the same time. It manifested as a burning desire “that all people were saved from the state they were in and were able to reach the ecstatic plenitude of knowing the Truth”. He became a live flame, burning in the fire of love. “He was burning all the time but he never consumed himself”. He often had sublime luminous visions. Some said they saw him walking on water or remaining still, in ecstasy, a couple of meters above the ground…

Motto: “He who will humble himself will be uplifted to God. He who will be full of vanity will therefore go down (crumble)”

The traditional spiritual doctrines all together require to give up the “I” and “mine”, which become relative as compared to the DIVINE SELF ( Atman) and to the divine will. The purifying fire of self-sacrifice of humility will consume the flaws of the confined being, and then will make the divine  Spark inside man (ATMAN) shine freely inside of it. Man will therefore extend from Finite to Infinite, from potential to acting, from striving to fulfillment.