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“Why do we practice Yoga?”
I had a teacher once ask that question during a particularly challenging Yoga class, back
in New York. We were all bent into these exhausting sideways triangles, and the teacher was
making us hold the position longer than any of us would have liked.
“Why do we practice Yoga?” he asked again. “Is it so we can become a little bendier than
our neighbors? Or is there perhaps some higher purpose?”
Yoga, in Sanskrit, can be translated as “union.” It originally comes from the root word yuj,
which means “to yoke,” to attach yourself to a task at hand with ox-like discipline. And the
task at hand in Yoga is to find union—between mind and body, between the individual and
her God, between our thoughts and the source of our thoughts, between teacher and student,
and even between ourselves and our sometimes hard-to-bend neighbors. In the West, we’ve
mainly come to know Yoga through its now-famous pretzel-like exercises for the body, but
this is only Hatha Yoga, one limb of the philosophy. The ancients developed these physical
stretches not for personal fitness, but to loosen up their muscles and minds in order to pre-
pare them for meditation. It is difficult to sit in stillness for many hours, after all, if your hip is
aching, keeping you from contemplating your intrinsic divinity because you are too busy con-
templating, “Wow... my hip really aches.”
But Yoga can also mean trying to find God through meditation, through scholarly study,
through the practice of silence, through devotional service or through mantra—the repetition
of sacred words in Sanskrit. While some of these practices tend to look rather Hindu in their
derivation, Yoga is not synonymous with Hinduism, nor are all Hindus Yogis. True Yoga
neither competes with nor precludes any other religion. You may use your Yoga—your discip-
lined practices of sacred union—to get closer to Krishna, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha or Yah-
weh. During my time at the Ashram, I met devotees who identified themselves as practicing
Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and even Muslims. I have met others who would rather
not talk about their religious affiliation at all, for which, in this contentious world, you can
hardly blame them.