The Yoga Path

Yoga, in Sanskrit, can be translated as ‘union’. It originally comes from the root word yuj, which means ‘to yoke’, to attach yourself to task at hand with ox-like discipline. And the task at hand in Yoga is to find union – between mind and body, between individual and her God, between our thoughts and the source of our thoughts, between teacher and student and even between ourselves and our sometimes annoying friends.

Today, mainly people come to know Yoga through Madonna or its pretzel exercises for the body, but this is only Hatha Yoga, one limb of the philosophy. The ancients developed these physical stretches not for personal fitness, but to loosen up their muscles and minds in order to prepare them for meditation. It is difficult to sit in stillness for many hours, after all, if your hips is aching, keeping you from contemplating, your intrinsic divinity because you are too busy contemplating, “wow….. my hips really aches”.

But Yoga can also mean trying to find God through meditation, through scholarly study, through the practice of silence, through devotional service or through mantra – the repetition of sacred words in Sanskrit. While some of these practices tend to look rather Hindu in their derivation, Yoga is not synonymous with Hinduism, nor are all Hindus Yogis. True Yoga neither competes with nor precludes any other religion. You may use your Yoga – your disciplines practices of sacred union – to get closer to Siva, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha or Yahweh. During my stay at the Ashram, I met devotees who identified themselves as practicing Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and even Muslims and at the same time others who would rather not talk about their religious affiliations at all, for which, in this contentious world, you can hardly blame them.

The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of human conditions, which I’m going to over-simplify define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. Different schools of thought over the centuries have found different explanations for man’s apparent inherently flawed state. Taoist calls it imbalance, Buddhism calls it ignorance, Islam blames our misery on rebellion against God and psychologist explains it ‘desire is the design flaw’.

Yoga is the effort to experience one’s divinity personally and then to hold on to that experience forever. Yoga is about self-mastery and the dedicated effort to haul your attention away from the endless brooding over the past and your nonstop worrying about the future, so that you can seek, instead, a place of eternal presence from which you may regard yourself and your surroundings with noise. Only from that point of even-mindedness will the true nature of yourself be revealed to you.

It’s about the journey, not the destination. Self journey. Self discovery. The Path. The Yoga Path was conceived based on that foundation.

Namaste.