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What is yoga? If you ask 100 people, you will get 100 different answers.
"Stretching exercises," or "pretzel poses," might be a response from some with only a passing familiarity with yoga.
Ask the kids I teach in jail and they respond, "Relaxation, helps control anxiety, helps you sleep better, free high." These might be side effects of the practice, but they don't pinpoint what yoga is. The result is not the same as the thing itself.
My usual response is that yoga is the union of body, mind and spirit, with the breath as the connection between the three aspects of our being.
Yoga is an ancient art and science, a technology handed down throughout the centuries, on how to live a healthy, happy life. It's a way of keeping the body fit, flexible, and free of toxins, which makes it a physical practice. It helps clear and calm the mind, creating an spacious canvas upon which to project our reality. Now it's a mental practice. It's a way of reconnecting with the Source of all happiness, the Divine. In that regard, it's a spiritual practice.
As a lifestyle, yoga teaches us how to be in the world. It acts as a guideline of how to act, both internally and externally, so that we create more harmony and less turbulence as we move through life. It helps us see and perceive the world more clearly.
As we become more flexible physically, we become more flexible mentally and spiritually as well. We allow ourselves to open up to grace, and allow life to unfold as it should, without our trying to exert control over it. Yoga is surrendering to the moment, realizing that there is nothing amiss, nothing out of place. Everything is unfolding exactly as it should, at the perfect time, and in the perfect way.
Yoga is a lifelong practice. Like a path through a meadow, the more we walk that path, the deeper the groove. Our brain has pathways, too, known as synapses. The connectors between neurons become stronger the more we practice something. The deeper you move into yoga, the deeper it moves into you, becoming part of your physiology.
Everything is yoga. No part of our life is left out. It allows us a way out of maya, the illusion of separateness; we awaken to the Reality of our true nature, bliss. All of it connects us back to Source. In that sense, yoga is a homecoming.
The possibility of bliss is open to all, yet very few people are willing to let go of their habitual way of being in order to achieve it. Clinging desperately to their habits, their belongings, and their immediate gratification, most people will go through their lives never achieving bliss, union or harmony. And yet yoga is available to all who seek it.
What is yoga to you? Feel free to share your thoughts.
Namaste,
Debbie
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