The commotion around yoga may be confusing. Three widely held fallacies about yoga are debunked by Sadhguru, who offers five pointers on what yoga actually is.
1 Yoga Means Union
Sadhguru: When you use the word “Yoga,” people in the western portion of the world typically see difficult physical postures. This notion of what yoga is is really twisted. It’s not necessary to hold your breath or bend and twist your body to do yoga. It is a technique and a process to help you reach the mental state where reality is experienced as it is.
Yoga means “union” in its literal sense.
You have a very strong concept, sense, and experience of who you are as you sit here. You are an individual present here. The trees are currently exhaling, and you are currently inhaling what they are exhaling. In other words, a portion of your lung is exposed. This goes beyond only the breath. As you read this, contemporary physics is demonstrating to you how every subatomic particle in your body is interacting constantly with everything else in the universe. You won’t exist if this transaction ends. Yoga is the practice of experiencing the oneness of existence.
You are being shown by modern science that everything of existence is made up of a single energy. God is supposedly present everywhere, according to the world’s faiths. We are discussing the same truth whether you say “God is everywhere” or “Everything is one energy.” A religious person has not experienced this, but he believes it because it is written someplace or has been uttered by someone; a scientist, on the other hand, has never experienced this and has come to it by mathematical calculations.
Yogis are people who refuse to accept explanations or belief systems because they are so stubborn. We say you are doing yoga when you are aware of the oneness of existence in the same way that you are aware of your five fingers.
2 Yoga Signifies a Complete Path by Itself
Moving toward an experienced reality where one is aware of the true essence of life and how it was created is what yoga entails. In essence, according to the tradition, everything that has the name “Yoga” attached to it denotes that it is a full path in and of itself. We shall use the term “Hatha Yoga” but not “Asana Yoga.”
3 Yoga Means to Break the Cycle of Life
The universe’s physical reality is cyclical in all respects. The solar system moves, planets orbit the sun, and the universe and galaxy as a whole are cyclical. You become more cyclical the more you identify with your bodily system. Your experiences and life’s cycle are both circular. Even the challenges you confront in life follow cycles, if you look closely enough.
If you are traveling around in circles, it just gives you the appearance that you are moving forward but you are actually simply repeating the same motions. Yoga entails widening the circle and stretching it out into a straight line so that if you follow the line, you will arrive at your destination rather of continuing in circles. It’s possible that many of you have already tried it and noticed. Let’s assume that you have been doing sadhana for a while. Simply pausing your sadhana for three months can cause a number of compulsions that you had no idea existed and had been absent for a considerable amount of time to reappear.
If you merely stop the sadhana, nature won’t let go of you so quickly, and these compulsions will return all of a sudden. If you don’t put in consistent effort, you must be content with simply performing the circle. Everything is genuine if you are unconscious or have very poor vision that only allows you to see three feet in front of you. It appears to be a circus when you open your eyes and observe the entire circle and the direction you are moving. You’ll want to take action since you’ll know that you don’t want it to last forever.
4 Yoga Means Liberating Yourself from Memory
Because the system has a variety of memories, obsessive cycles can occur repeatedly. There is a tremendous amount of memory, including genetic, evolutionary, elemental, atomic, karmic, inarticulate, and articulate memory. Your body wouldn’t even take on a physical shape if this memory weren’t present. There are billions of people on the earth, but they all have these features: two hands, two legs, and two eyes. Your body understood it had to assume this form when you were still within your mother’s womb. We are unsure of the shape it would have taken if the memory had not existed.
Only because of memory have you been able to maintain your physical shape in this way. Memory always refers to the past. When you watch a movie, what happens is more bigger and more real than the actual. Because it is so overblown, it appears bigger than reality. But this is all simply a reenactment of recollection. It may be captured on film, in digital form, or in another manner, but it is only a memory because it has already happened. If the only thing defining who you are at this moment is the knowledge you have stored in your memory, you are past if that is the case. Real life does not exist; memory plays are all that exist.
Even your ideas, feelings, and urges to like or detest things or to love or loathe certain people are all based on memories. The time has passed. You still have the memories of someone you loved yesterday. You still remember how you felt about someone yesterday. If you strive to live what has passed, what is will pass you by.
Yoga involves releasing oneself from the knowledge that makes you who you are right now. Your thoughts, feelings, and life experiences shouldn’t be influenced by the factors that define your skin color and body shape. If your current situation is not determined by that information, you are going into yoga.
The purpose of the everyday morning sadhana is only to progressively separate oneself from that knowledge. You don’t need to misplace it. If you lose sight of it, you will repeat your previous stupid actions. You should never forget, even if your life has been very awful. This has less to do with forgetting and more to do with carrying it.
You have memory sticks today. You will lose your mind if it is always playing and hooked in. However, if you put it in your pocket or plug it in your computer whenever you want, that’s OK; there will be no issues. Although memory is still present, it is not compelled to operate through you. You may intentionally activate it when you wish to; otherwise, you can set it away and it will remain inactive. Memory is not an issue once that freedom has been achieved. However, memory is a concern right now because it keeps acting up. Who you are now is determined by your preferences from yesterday. You won’t be able to understand what is happening right now or have any sort of perspective on life.
5 Yoga is a Technology for Transformation
In essence, whatever a human person is capable of doing is a manifestation of who they are. A song is sung, a dance is performed, a book is written, and a painting is created. Whether you’re aware of it or not, everything you say and do fundamentally reflects who you are.
Yoga is just the reverse of this since it focuses on changing the very foundations of one’s life rather than on expressing who they are. The practice of various yoga systems may alter the very principles of your brain’s functioning, your chemistry, and even your genetic makeup, according to a growing body of medical and scientific research. We have always seen this, therefore there is no need for confirmation, but today there is scientific evidence to support this.
You could feel a little bit changed if you use an activity to express yourself fully. Some metamorphosis may occur if you put all of your heart into your cooking, singing, or dancing. That is simply a specific effect that results from complete participation in a certain activity, but in essence, that activity is by its very nature an expression of who you are rather than defining who you are. However, yoga is a technique that allows you to change the contour of who you are, both physically and figuratively.
3 Misconceptions About Yoga
1 Yoga Is a Philosophy
Nowadays, everyone constantly presents their own ideas, beliefs, and ideologies. Because people are so preoccupied with their own logic and intellect, no one wants to see life as it is. You believe that the entire cosmos has sprung from your brains, which is why you have conceptions about it. We are like particles of dust here; you and I are so little. Nothing will change even if we vanish right now. In three days, a handful of those close to us will grieve and forget about us. Everything will work out just fine.
We must realize that who we are is not an idea, but rather a circumstance. Who the heck are you to come up with a theory about the universe? You are a tiny speck, a microbe. It’s great if you can make sense of this in any way.
There are only techniques to improve your perception in the entire system of yoga, as only what you perceive is real and everything else is just something you’ve made up in your brain.
2 Yoga Is All About Postures
Asanas are generally what modern yoga is to the majority of individuals worldwide. Only a minor portion of yoga preparation involves asanas. Yoga is a way of being, not a technique, a specific movement, or a position. A person is doing yoga when they start to perceive everything as a component of themselves. Intellectually, everything we say about it will at most pique your interest in learning more about it or motivate you to follow the yoga path. Yoga is impossible to describe in words, but if someone is open to it, they can certainly experience it.
3 Yoga Is an Exercise to Stay Healthy
Yoga may draw people at first since it has many health advantages and may help them reduce stress. There are unquestionably both physical and mental advantages. It is possible to undergo remarkably positive changes in terms of serenity, pleasure, and health. And many individuals have miraculously recovered from their long-term illnesses. But that is not what yoga is really. Yoga’s main goal is to expand and include your life experience to the point where you stop being an individual and start to function as a universal process. You’ll see that it produces amazing outcomes.
It was explained how to match this human system with the cosmic geometry when the physical components of yoga were initially introduced. All friction is eliminated if you have it exactly positioned. Internal conflict indicates that you are at odds with yourself and a problem in your own right. What other problem can you address when you are a problem all by yourself? There is stress everywhere. The difficulties will keep growing as you engage in more worldly endeavors. Because of this, your body, mind, emotions, and energy should be a resource for you rather than a hindrance.
If these four are in harmony, suddenly this body and this mind are capable of things you never even dreamed were conceivable. You’ll be perceived as superhuman by others. You will do your tasks with a particular level of effectiveness and expertise whether they are related to work, the home, love, or war. This is due to the fact that you discovered the geometry of life in a very fundamental sense, whether consciously or unconsciously.
The Origins of Yoga
Although Patanjali is regarded as the founder of yoga in the contemporary era, did you know that yoga actually dates back thousands of years before Patanjali? The first Yogi, who reluctantly assumed the role of Guru, is described by Sadhguru as having taught his seven disciples—who later evolved into the seven fundamental kinds of Yoga—the science of yoga.
Benefits of Yoga
In response to a query on yoga’s health advantages, Sadhguru explains how it keeps you healthy. He discusses the energy body and its function in preserving bodily and mental health and shows how preserving the energy body’s vibrancy assures a healthy existence.
Types of Yoga
Ever ponder which kind of yoga is best for you? It might be difficult to cut through the noise when there are so many different Yoga techniques being spread around the world. There are just four fundamental forms of yoga, according to Sadhguru, and merging all four is the fastest and most steady method to go down the spiritual path, regardless of the style of yogic practice one engages in.
Karma Yoga
Karma literally translates as “activity.” Karma Yoga is the practice of using action as a tool for spiritual development. Sadhguru teaches how one may engage in activity in a way that prevents it from turning into an entanglement process and instead makes it a strong basis for one’s release.
Hatha Yoga
The physical parts of yoga and its asanas have grown to be its most popular subsets. Hatha Yoga is a potent method of working with one’s energies to achieve ultimate unity with the cosmos, however it is not only a kind of physical exercise.
Kundalini Yoga
Misconceptions abound regarding the esoteric science of Kundalini Yoga. Discover the meaning of kundalini and how to approach Kundalini Yoga from a realized master. He discusses the need of approaching this potent spiritual practice with the highest respect and responsibility.