What do you think of when you think of yoga? Why yoga has become so misinterpreted? And what true yoga actually is?
It’s easy to say that yoga is just about looking good. The glamorous pictures on Instagram and power yoga classes make it seem like the only point of yoga is to get into difficult postures.
So 5,000 years ago, yoga was developed in India as a way to harmonize the mind, body, and soul. But if you google “yoga,” or scroll through yoga-related hashtags, you probably won’t see an Indian person. You’ll most likely see flexible women practicing postures the more physically demanding, the better in expensive yoga pants on beaches or in chic workout studios.
First up, physical postures are not Yoga. They are called ‘asana’. When you go to what is commonly called ‘a yoga class’, you are likely attending an asana class. You are learning how to do postures with your body.
Society started to misrepresent yoga over time. And this days we don’t know what true yoga actually is.
True yoga is not about the shape of your body. It isn’t just a workout. True yoga is about how you feel about yourself: your spirit, your mind, your body, no matter who, what, when you are in life. It is your personal journey towards the goals you want to achieve. Philosophy espousing an eight-limbed approach to conscious living.
You can regular yoga practice as a way to manage my migraines, and to help deal with stress from job and finance. Put simply, yoga save you. You back to a state of calm and regain your true sense of self.
Your mind thinks thoughts. We think that we are our thoughts. We have a depressed thought; weare depressed. We have a happy thought; we are happy. Yoga is mastery of your thoughts, where they no longer control you.
This is Yoga – a state of Self-Realization. Self-realisation is the place where you drop down deep beneath your thoughts. You may have a depressed thought, but you are not depressed. You may even have a happy thought, but you are not happy. Instead, you are resting in your own True Nature, which is unbounded consciousness.
You need to practice this. When you do asana, you need to be witnessing the fluctuations of your own mind. You need to catch yourself when you’re identifying with your thought streams and drop back down into unbounded consciousness.