YOGA FOR BEGINNERSWhat Is Yoga?
Yoga is now. That’s it. That’s all there is to know. Good night
and thank you.
Okay, it’s far more than that. But that sentence, Yoga is
now, is the whole thing boiled down to three words.
The problem is that “now” is a pretty hard concept to put
into practice in our daily lives. Have you ever tried to live in
the moment, right here, right now, with no distractions and
no other thoughts in your head? It’s difficult. That’s why a
man named Patanjali, who lived during the second century
BC, wrote the Yoga Sutras as a guide to yoga. “Yoga is now”
is the first of his 196 sutras. But it’s only the beginning of
his teachings.
Patanjali, who is considered to be the founder of the
philosophy of yoga, defines yoga as the ability to cease
identification with the movements of the mind—in other
words, to “live in the now.” The literal translation of yoga is
“to yoke” or “union” or “to join.” Modern yogis translate this
as the union of the mind and the body. This is why when
most of us think of yoga, we think of Down Dog or fancy
balancing poses. Much of the work that we do in the physical
practice of yoga is meant to carry over into our mental states.
For example, if we hold a pose and work through some
discomfort in our thighs or our arms, then we learn to
understand that when we are faced with the pain that comes
from the difficult times in our lives, we have the strength to
get through it. The physical helps the mental and vice versa;
therefore, one cannot exist without the other, and that is why
we have yoga—or the union of the two.