What is Yoga?

There are plenty of definitions out there of what yoga is, what the word yoga means and how it should and should not be practiced, but as a yoga teacher I am mostly interested in how it feels in the body, how it focuses the mind and how it can serve as a tool to lead a more easeful, peaceful and useful life. Yoga is, ultimately, a practice: a discipline. And to experience yoga is to experience peace; a permanent calm that stays with you no matter the storm you may find yourself in. The secret to the practice is ... practice. No matter what brings you to the mat, be it purely physical, mental or spiritual: the regular practice of controlling the breath, raising awareness of the body and stilling the mind will invariably change the way you live.

Although the discipline of yoga extends far beyond the physical postures, and the physical postures are only a tiny part of the practice, there is still a sense that yoga is all about asana (postures), which is fine by me. At worst, if practicing only for its physical benefits (of which there are many), your body will enjoy the movement and breath of yoga and that can only be positive. Some yoga is better than no yoga as a teacher of mine used to say. But within this part of the practice, there seems to be some obsession with proper posture as if the body were only a machine that moves mechanically this way or that, irrespective of your state of mind or health or general sense of being. We know that the way the body feels is very much connected to where we are in our heads, where we've been, what injuries or scars - visible or invisble - we carry. Not to mention our individual anatomical limitations. Every body experiences every pose differently. It does not matter then if the toes point forward or slightly outward or if the head does or does not reach the knees or if our backbend is only a very slight lift of the chest. It matters that we move with awareness and breath, hopefully with some love, remembering it is after all, a practice (not a performance). A very personal practice that belongs to no one else. So I would encourage you to practice however, wherever you like, for whatever reasons and whatever goals you may have in mind, but do practice. Yoga is a practice so the benefits only come if you do it regularly.

My next post will be some beginner tips on where to start, if you haven't already started, which should hopefully be useful even to the most seasoned yogi. I hear many teachers, like myself, say that yoga is not about the pose, but there doesn't seem to be so much out there on what else there is to practice. So within these blog posts I hope to offer a bit more of the the whole of yoga, beyond the poses.

Until then, drop the shoulders, soften the belly. Take a big breath in and exhaaaale.

Thanks for reading.