What Is Yoga? Every day in the morning, women in traditional India use rice flour to create patterns known as kolam or rangoli on the floor just outside their house. Dots are joined with lines, reminding us how connecting stars to create constellations helps us understand the sky. Likewise, connecting data creates information, connecting parts creates the whole, and joining the limited helps us explore the limitless. This household ritual is Kolam a metaphor for yoga. The simplest meaning of yoga (often pronounced “joga” by many Indians) is alignment. This alignment can be between two parts of the body, two objects, or two concepts. In Indian astrology, or jyotisha-shastra, for example, when stars and planets are aligned in a particular way to create a beneficial pattern, the word yoga or joga is used to describe it. The same word is used in social contexts for the coming together of seemingly unaligned things to bring about success. A person who aligns things that are seemingly unaligned in order to get things done is deemed jugadu (or jogadu in Odia, a language from east India), which means a resourceful person, though the word is sometimes used pejoratively for a fixer. The yogi (or jogi) and the yogini (or jogini) were those who aligned seemingly misaligned forces to get things done. That is what made a yogi yogya, or worthy.
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