What is Yoga?
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An extract from the book The Teachings of Yoga.
Yoga is a stream that flows through the landscape of India’s history. It has shaped India's historical terrain and been shaped by it. More recently, the stream of yoga has flowed across the world and into America, though in a form that hardly resembles its source.
Essentially, yoga is a set of practices that supports movement along a path which leads to a state of being. Historically, the word has been used for all three: the practices, the path, and the state. The practices generally involve some type of control, like keeping the body still in a specific position, slowing the pattern of breathing, withdrawing the senses from contact with outward objects, and focusing the mind. They also include things like fasting, cleaning the body, and maintaining integrity in relationships, all of which require controlling our impulses.
The practices of yoga support movement along a path of yoga. This path leads from the experience of separation and isolation to the experience of unity and oneness. It leads from the embodied self feeling like it's an individual entity involved in an existential competition against other individuals for access to scarce resources to the embodied self knowing that it is one with all existence. This is the state of yoga, the union of the embodied self with the Supreme Being.
Practices are only truly yoga practices if they support foreword movement along the path of yoga. And a path is only truly a yoga path if it leads toward the state of yoga. Practices found in yoga texts can be done with the intention of enhancing the separative ego: that within us which experiences itself as separate. They can be done to make the body look nice, or to make us more flexible, or to help increase our focus so we can be more successful at work and make more money. None of these things is inherently wrong, but if they inhibit the movement toward union with the Supreme Being, then they are inhibiting yoga.
The modern fitness industry has absorbed a set of practices that were mostly curated by one Indian family and honed them into a product that it calls yoga. This product is wildly popular, and generates billions of dollars a year for those who trade in it. And it legitimately helps people feel better. But whether the people who are selling and buying yoga are actually practicing yoga depends on where the practices are taking them. Are they awakening to the fundamental truth that they are one with all creation and with the Being that breathes the cosmos into existence?
Yoga is not about feeling or getting better, stronger, healthier, or happier. It is not a workout routine or a personal empowerment program. Yoga is union in the most fundamental and comprehensive sense: union of spirit and matter, human and Divine. It is a joining of the mental/emotional personality with the soul, the body with the Earth, the heart’s aspirations with the future. It is a cry from the heart of the Earth that seeks to find within itself the heart of heaven.
Yoga asks the essential questions of humanity: who am I? why am I alive? what is going on here? who are these other beings around me? It is a longing and a seeking and a progressive discovery.
The stream of yoga has flowed through the teachings and lives of countless gurus. Some wrote their teachings down, or were written about by their disciples; some just lived and embodied yoga and nourished the aspiring hearts of those who came to learn and grow. Texts have recorded some of these teachings and lives, snapshots of yoga’s course through time. These texts hold more than words: they hold vibration, energy, concentrated wisdom in which we can wrap ourselves, immerse and bathe.
They also hold diverse and varied messages and approaches to yoga, some of which directly contradict each other. Some say that a state of oneness and fulfillment is achieved by escaping the material world. They say that the limitations of pain and fear are inherent to living in a body, and that the best way to escape them is to flee the body, overcome its limitations by mastering its urges and impulses. These yogis renounced the world and rejected the trappings of family, commerce and community to seek their transcendent goal in monasteries, caves and jungles. Others have taught that the state of unity that yoga seeks can be found by immersing in the material world and discovering the inherent divinity in every layer of our being and every molecule of matter.