The Yoga term svarūpa sthiti describes one of the pinnacle experiences of spiritual practice. It is the moment the sādhaka becomes the Yogi.
Svarūpa literally means form of the Self. Sthiti means to be steadily seated. Their combination means ‘to be seated in one’s true Self’. The more popular term for this is Self-Realisation.
When one experiences svarūpa sthiti, one — for the very first time — becomes Whole again. In ancient times, one would say such a person becomes Holy.
There comes a time in each person’s spiritual practice, in this lifetime or another, that one perfectly aligns all the cakras in a sattvic state for just a single moment.
This is the creation of a perfect brahmarandra, or ‘Brahman’s void’. This is called so, because in this state of being the energy system is finally strong enough to — often for a very brief moment only — receive God, or Brahman, for the first time in one’s whole Being.
When this happens, there isn’t just a flash of partially perceiving the Divine Energy. Rather, it is the first time we experience the Divine in its fullness. Or ourselves at fully Divine for the first time.
If anything, it feels totally endless, infinite, boundless — but indescribably so, as if all words fall short in describing the experience.
True Nature
The experience is made possible by our Soul. Our Soul is the mediator between our personality and the ‘Divine Spark’ that we essentially are. For this reason, it is said that the Soul is the point within our Being where we are One with the Divine.
The Soul, in Yoga, is called puruṣa, while the Divine Spark, sometimes also termed the Monad, is called atman. This is also reflected in the famous saying in Yoga that ‘atman is Brahman’.
The term Self-Realisation is used for this experience, because it is the moment we realise our true self is not the person we’ve always been in the world, or simply the best version of it. It is, rather, the moment we realise — as a fact of nature and no longer as a mental concept — that we are in fact atman, and that atman is Brahman.
Atman is the Self with a capital S.
Therefore, we can say that Self-Realisation is the realisation that as a fact we are in truth a Soul, living a Human Experience.
A period
After the experience of Self-Realisation, your life will never be the same. One simply cannot undo the experience that one is in fact a Soul. Whole and utterly One — both within and One with the whole of creation.
Having had such a new experience, it is the new pinnacle of all your experiences. Therefore, your human nature will drive you to seek it again and again.
In this way, Self-Realisation is the start of a period in your spiritual development in which you will seek to relive it again and again, until there is no negative karma anymore to prevent you from experiencing it.
This period culminates in the experience of mokṣa.
We distinguish between Self-Realisation as the first experience of oneself as being the Self, and Self-Realisation as the period of establishing this experience in steadfastness.
Only when this period has been completed, and mokṣa has been brought about, we usually speak of ‘a Self-Realised person’. Until that time we speak of ‘a person who has experienced Self-Realisation’.
For most people, the period of Self-Realisation will be what they will go through for the rest of their lives. Some people, having gathered enough tools and experiences to do so, will be able to move even past this period of Self-Realisation.
