Sadhguru's eagerly awaited visit to London on 18 May was a huge success, drawing a large number of guests and volunteers to a packed public talk at the Royal Lancaster Hotel.

He introduced the idea of Inner Engineering by suggesting an everyday mechanism -air conditioning - could be perceived as a miracle. "If I make you internally air-conditioned, would you call it a miracle? Whatever the life situation, you still know how to be cool - would you call that a miracle? You can't air condition the whole world," he said, but (pointing to his chest) "at least this one - cool!" But that has not been happening for a long time and instead we mortgage our happiness to a million things outside, he reminded us.

"What's happening in your mind is your business, but can you keep your mind as you want it for two minutes, or even 10 seconds? When you exist here as an accident you're a potential calamity... If your body and mind are not taking instructions from you, you're in a lot of trouble. For everything else you're relying on technology, but for yourself you want something magical to happen."

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Later, in response to questions from a young woman struggling to resolve her family's resistance to her spiritual journey, he said: "Life exists only in inclusiveness. Exclusiveness is a perverted idea in your mind. For that you're paying a price, always. Everything around you seems to be so desperately out of control and you can't live with it. You want order. If you bring too much order, you can't live with order, you want to break something to feel a little liberated. Is this not a social problem that societies are going through all the time?

So you need to understand this problem is mainly because you got mixed up with the physicality, and the other dimension which is not physical... The physicality of who you are needs order, needs framework, needs walls around itself for protection, but the other dimension needs expansion in a limitless way... Settle that first, then manage the outside to the best of your ability. That's all you can do.

In your life, if you do not do what you cannot do, there is no problem. But if you do not do what you can do, you're a disaster. First settle this one, then, taking charge of the destiny, we will see... Destiny is: are you moving towards liberation or are you getting entangled? That's the fundamental question with life."

Sadhguru's response to this question particularly touched one guest Elisabet Sahtouris, a highly regarded evolution biologist and futurist, who said: "I found him very accessible, very open and direct. I loved his answers to the last young woman's questions. I loved that he answered her from several directions in great detail and offered her a lot to think about on her life path."

Another guest, Mark Desvaux, a social entrepreneur, broadcaster and documentary film-maker, said: "You can really feel how genuine he is as a person and a mystic. He's completely full of joy all the time, laughing and having a lot of fun, and at the end he actually came to the audience - I found that very touching, and I find what he says very profound. It's very easy to understand but it has such depth that he touches a part of people that rarely gets touched, and I think that's what makes him a very special individual."

On the following evening, Sadhguru spoke with a similar theme to 75 invited guests at the Nehru centre in London. The guests were also invited to attend a leadership retreat with Sadhguru in the UK from 1 - 4 October 2009.