Every yogic practice, whatever kind it may be, is essentially drawn from the process of Bhuta Shuddhi. If you do an asana, surya namaskar, surya kriya, pranayama or a kriya, in a way, you are doing Bhuta Shuddhi. In other words, you address life in its most fundamental form, which are the five elements. You can address life just as body. You can address life as prana or life energy. You can address life on the cellular level. You can even address life on the atomic level. Or you can address life on the elemental level, which is most fundamental. Yoga is an attempt towards that.

It is these five elements that make up this body, this planet, this solar system, and the universe. Each of these five elements has its own individual nature, and all of them are capable of absorbing and retaining information. The whole system of bhuta shuddhi has evolved from the knowledge that the five elements can take in and hold information. If information is properly put into anything, it also creates an intention. Depending upon what kind of information you hold about something, you naturally develop a certain intention towards that something. Once you have an intention, you start moving in that direction.

Often unconsciously, unknowingly, unintentionally, human beings are doing some kind of bhuta shuddhi. To give an example – there are leaders who, if they enter a space, change the atmosphere around them by their sheer presence. There are many people – not only spiritual ones – who, when they walk into a room, change the atmosphere there in an instant. This is a certain amount of bhuta shuddhi, performed unconsciously. If you can do it consciously, it is far more result-oriented. There are other aspects of energy that one can influence and thereby change the atmosphere, but this does not impact other people as profoundly as when the elements rearrange themselves because of a certain presence of energy and intention.

It is this basis that gives bhuta shuddhi its effectiveness and its ability to transform a human being in miraculous ways. The process that we do here is a simple form of bhuta shuddhi.

The idea of practicing bhuta shuddhi is to rearrange the way the elements function within you. You want to change the intention with which they function within you. If the elements within you function in the same way as they function in the earth or a tree, it is not useful to you. In the human system, the elements function in a particular way. We want them to function that way and to transform themselves into higher and higher possibilities.