Understanding Yoga

When you hear about yoga, what do you usually think? Mostly you will  think of physical postures, being extremely flexible and religious. Now this is more of a materialist like yoga that has developed over the hundreds of years since it has been brought to the world where people have taken only superficial aspects of yoga and applied them to our society.

Yoga is not a physical exercise what you think of, it is actually a spiritual tradition and it is a gift from India to the world. It is more of an inward journey than an outward journey. 

The physical exercise routine of the modern yoga we see in the modern world is a poor cousin of ‘hatha yoga’ in traditional yoga. Often the modern yoga you see is more related to Pilates than anything of the spiritual nature. 

People around the world  have somehow left out a lot of core understanding of yoga and most people don't even know where yoga came from. The word yoga in its original Sanskrit root comes from the word Yuj, now Yuj can be understood as union, it means to extract your consciousness from the gravitational pull of external things.

Yoga tends to rein in the tendency of our mind and our consciousness to gravitate towards the external world. It rebuilds the focus back within. Yoga trains consciousness to turn inward to realize the true underlying essence of our awareness. We can understand yoga as two basic concepts. Yoga as a practice is sometimes referred to as "Paddhati," and yoga as a state is also referred to as "Sthithi."

Now that you know that yoga is both a process and a state, you'll see that when you practice the different asanas, pranayama, and other practical aspects of yoga, you are going through its process. Once you finish that or begin to progress to the higher levels of yoga, you arrive at meditation and the process of samadhi, which is when you enter a state of "Yuj," however.

You must begin to comprehend yoga as both a method and a condition. We begin practicing yoga outside of the four walls of the yoga studios because truly yoga is a lifestyle, not just something that you do for an hour and then forget about. It needs to exist in every single thing that you are doing or experiencing in your life. 

Saint Patanjali, who listed eight steps or ways, in which you can actually ascend onto the process of yoga, explained that since the process of self-development on the path of yoga requires such a large amount of dedication and patience, it is actually possible for humans to achieve this process of Yuj. These are the eight steps.-

The first one is called ‘Yamas. There are 5 distinct principles that define how you can be socially disciplined. Second one is called 'Niyama's. It explains how you can be self disciplined.

Saint Patanjali believed that those two were the prerequisites to start practicing the process of yoga. The third one that he described was the ‘Asanas’ or the postures.

Now a lot of us place emphasis on the asana and think the physical postures are the only thing that yoga is made up of but we cant be more mistaken because as you realize in these eight different steps of yoga asana is just the third one. So, once you get over the third limb, which is asana, we start moving into ‘Pranayama’ or the understanding of the  function of your body.

Then you move into Pratyahara that explains that you need to withdraw your senses to actually begin entering the inner world and ascending on the spiritual path. Then comes the ‘Dharna’ it is known for the sense of concentration which explains to focus for a short period of time. After Dharna comes ‘Dhyana’ which is known as meditation that is when you are so focused that you become the object that you are focusing on.

Then you come to the final one which is Samadhi. Now, samadhi means the same state of being. When  you reach a state of samadhi you are in a complete ‘state of Yog’ now you have become one or completely integrated with the object of your meditation. 

Now you know that yoga has so many different processes that you can ascend to and asana is only one aspect of it. The reason that we do asanas is to prepare our body to meditate longer. The more you do asanas the more your body becomes flexible and you will be able to sit in meditative posture for a longer period of time. This is just the foundation of the entire yogic literature, but for your understanding of yoga this is the true meaning and practice of yoga.