Ramiro Calle: Biography Of A Yoga Teacher

Today we get closer to the life of the most important Spanish yoga teacher of all time, Ramiro Calle. We are talking about a famous writer who has 250 published books, 120 trips to India and with almost 50 years teaching oriental wisdom in the first Spanish yoga school: Shadak.

For years he has been the greatest disseminator of oriental spirituality in our country. He is a yoga and meditation teacher and thousands of people have passed through his center. His works are mostly philosophical and spiritual, as well as various collections of travels and stories.

His teachings are far from the most modern currents, from that banalized gym yoga and from the meditation learned in a consultation. Ramiro Calle’s teachings connect with the spiritual, mental, emotional, self-knowledge and personal development path. His philosophy has always drank from the true sources.

Of course, he is a great advocate for the physical and mental benefits of yoga. A practice originally from India and with an antiquity of more than 5000 years . The teachings of Ramiro Calle comprise the original teachings of this discipline, which include meditation, breathing, mantras and rituals. That is, physical yoga and mental yoga.

The beginning

Ramiro Calle was born in Madrid in 1943 . His beginnings in yoga were through a teacher from India who visited Madrid and whose teachings were attended by Ramiro Calle’s mother. It was she who introduced him to this method of mastery of the mind at the age of 15. Since then, it has become his passion, his way of life and his great legacy.

His interest led him to discover the knowledge and practice of numerous techniques such as meditation, pranayana , recitation of mantras, observation techniques and everything that is considered inner work in Eastern traditions. He has trained with the best teachers in India during his many travels.

This inner work encompasses different levels of personality, instinct, motor skills, mental and energetic work. His books do not delve too deeply into his personal beliefs in order not to dogmatize or condition his thousands of followers and students.

Ramiro Calle has always been very careful in this regard, and has tried to understand  the different disciplines of yoga as a personal path to conquer ourselves. That transmits in his teachings, the diffusion of the Dharma.

A pulse to death

Some years ago, a bacterium acquired in Sri Lanka put Ramiro Calle on the edge of the place from which many never return. An infection in the brain kept him in a coma for several days and his doctors awaited his imminent death.

In a totally inexplicable way, he was regaining his life after two long months of convalescence in the hospital, suffering from a practically fatal illness. According to his own words, he entered the hospital as a mature man and left it as an old man, with severely diminished lung capacity and motor difficulties.

His tenacity and his practices gave him back his life, his body and his mind, although he returned from that place with a renewed vision of compassion, humility and how vulnerable we are as human beings.

Ramiro Calle’s books

His 250 published books are impossible to name here. Therefore, we highlight, due to its relevance, The Great Yoga Book , which offers the reader a hundred postures and other techniques. In his work Breathe , he talks about breathing as a vital force and as a link between the mind and the body.

In The Great Meditation Book , Ramiro Calle proposes a detailed study of meditation techniques, its teachings and its various aspects. Other works are presented as a series of treatises on our emotions, along these lines, we find: The art of patience, The art of harmony and The key to inner peace.

In The Path of Mindfulness , the author provides us with the necessary methods to train and develop mindfulness. Other works such as In the Limit and Journey to the Bottom of Myself are more autobiographical. Thus, in the first, Calle does a review exercise of his own life after having found himself on the brink of death.

In the second, he reveals to us the most intimate, younger Ramiro Calle, and conveys that concern about that search that has accompanied him all his life and from whose legacy we can drink as from a true source of wisdom.