Most of us think of yoga as bodily movements, flows, breathing exercise & all the health benefits that such physical actions will bring about. Yoga is all this & much much more. Its a discipline, a way of life, a way to walk, talk, eat, work - in short yoga is in everything, a step by step path to reach your highest potential. Yoga evolves the mind, raising the level of consciousness, to go beyond the mind & realise who you really are.
To understand better - animals have consciousness which is at a lower level as hu mans. They feel as we do but human can make sense of our feelings, analyse, ponder & choose our responses. Animals react as per their brain programming. What yoga does it to teach us techniques, some with the body, some with the breath, to raise our level of awareness. With greater awareness, we can choose to excercise greater options of behaviour, thought patterns & rise above our inherent programming. Thats creations - something new from what was.
We start by training the body because we have some control over it, so we discipline it first. Then the breath is trained. We train our senses as our awareness increases & make better, perhaps different choices. Overall, we create a new way based on harmony within ourself & also harmonious to all around us. Thats yoga.
"Yogash chitta vritti nirodhah" - Yoga is restraining of the mind. Thats the defination of Yoga according to Patanjali, the author of The Yoga Sutras. The Sutras are a compilation of every yogic wisdom in the world. Anything you need to know about yoga, refer to this single source. The problem is that these sutras or aphorism, 195 in all, are in sanskrit & you need an interpretor to decode & understand it. Thats the part i enjoy :)
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