Yoga is a path to understand yourself in relation to the universe.
Yoga is restraining the mind stuff (chitta) from taking various forms (vrittis)Yoga Sutra 1.2
The practice of yoga is a multi-step process that results in knowledge of the self.
How do you do yoga?
Yoga is a multi-faceted technique for peaceful existence. The process consists of physical exercises, community service, breathwork, and meditation.
Doing yoga is allowing life’s experiences to gracefully flow into and out of your life.
Land and Heart Yoga
Control of the yoga mind is by practice and non-attachment
Yoga Sutra 1.12
Is there a goal of yoga?
The intention of yoga is to find peace within. Yoga is an explanation of how true happiness comes from the self and that attachment to external forces is only a fleeting sensation of joy.
Yoga is a lifetime’s worth of work.
Yoga is the guide towards ease and flow. Flow state can be achieved momentarily from other activities – like athletes or artists who lose themselves in their work. That fleeting moment while performing a task and the mind becomes completely focused on the moment. There is no future or past, just here and now. It’s a loss of sense of time.
Flow state is the goal of yoga.
With practice, the flow state, the blissful awareness of now, the peacefulness of self, can become part of daily existence.
Why teach?
As you start teaching yoga, your students will ask you these questions. What is yoga? How do you do yoga? Is there a goal? The answers are elusive.
But, by maintaining your own practice, understanding yoga in your own life and sharing your lived experience, you will be able to guide students to their own answers.
Land and Heart Yoga
Be compassionate to your students and their reasons for doing yoga. There is no wrong reason to do yoga, but some of your students’ reasons will be incongruent with your own. As the teacher, you are the purveyor of knowledge.
