What is yoga? Yoga is a noun and a verb. Yoga is an action and its reaction, an active process and a passive reflection. It is both a physical and mental activity and when practiced with awareness creates a great synergy when the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. This brings us to spirit.
The yoga that we do in class is “practice” yoga. We practice certain techniques that we can later draw on when we are not in our yoga class but in our everyday moment to moment lives. Yoga is an awareness. Don’t confuse practicing postures with yoga. Many dancers or gymnasts can demonstrate incredible postures but that is not yoga. Yoga is practicing awareness, awareness of the self, awareness of thought, awareness of the mind awareness of the environment and awareness of consciousness. We start with breath awareness.
Yoga is timeless. It comes to us today from a distant past and is as timely and relevant today as it was thousands of years ago. Thats because it is always NOW. Yoga is not an activity or something we do to get a good workout. Yoga IS, when we have that awareness then we are in the state of yoga. We can cultivate this awareness by certain practices. They are the practice of being still and quiet and working in the body to develop the awareness of the thoughts that arise and letting go of them and of the breath that moves through the body sustaining and maintaining it and making the breath a conscious act. By practice of this do we come into yoga.
Yoga may be called an art because it opens up the creative energies within us, but it is more than an art. Yoga may be called the philosophy of yoga insofar as it is based on truth and philosophy is a search for truth and understanding .But it is more than a philosophy. Yoga may be confused with religion as it can bring one closer to God, but it is not in and of itself a religion. So we call yoga the science of yoga because it is based on the scientific method of direct observation, direct experience and cause and effect. Yoga may also be known as Hatha Yoga or the yoga of holding postures.
HA means sun and THA means moon so Hatha means the unity of solar and lunar forces, of poistive and negative charges, of male and female principles and in the unity in dualities, or to look at it another way the merging of dualities to form unity. the word yoga comes from the sanskrit word “yug” which means to yoke or bind, Yoga has both an active and passive aspect being neither one nor the other. The act of yoga, the creation of the yogic state is like music. Visualize an instrument, say a piano, a musician sits with the instrument and music comes forth. Where does the music come from? from the instrument, from the musician? Is it divisible?.
So it is with yoga, the practitioner sits down for their practice concentrates their attention and the process of transformation begins.