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 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.

Kolam

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Depending on the context, yoga has come to have different meanings: alignment of the mind with the body, or of breath and mind, or of mind and breath and body, or simply between different body parts. It could be harmony between the front and back, the left and right sides, or the upper and lower parts of the body. Some might say it is a connection of the individual with society; others, the connection between two human beings, whether husband and wife, parent and child, teacher and student, or friends. In a religious context, one would say it is the connection between the devotee and the deity.

Various terms are now used to describe how this connection is achieved. For example, karma yoga deals with connecting through action, where our individual activity is aligned to a larger social goal; bhakti yoga deals with connecting through emotions, with a person or a personal deity; gyan yoga is more intellectual; hatha yoga is more physical; tantra yoga favors rituals and symbols.

Patanjali, author of the Yoga Sutra, organized various yogic techniques in a systematic way. His eight-fold (ashtanga) yoga, also known as the royal (raja) yoga, reveals a very traditional Indian understanding of the human body as a series of concentric containers, with the social container (karana sharira) outside the physical (sthula sharira), and the psychological (sukshma sharira) inside the physical. Within the psychological container resides the immortal soul (atma) that animates us.

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It is called the resident (dehi) of the body (deha), and is an extension of the boundless container that contains the cosmos (param-atma). Many use words like astral body for the karana sharira. But this manifests as the social body, which is based on all things we attract to ourselves naturally

Inner connections because of reactions to past actions (karma) or all things we bring into our lives through our present actions (also karma). In Indian mythology, karma is believed to shape the circumstances of our life, both voluntary and involuntary. Also, in Buddhism, the atma is not an eternal entity but a creation of our psychological body. Atma is referred to as jiva in Jainism.

The sequence of eight (ashta) limbs (anga) in the Yoga Sutra becomes a journey from the outside to the inside. So, there is Yama, Niyama, Asana, Pranayama, Pratyahara, Dharana, Dhyana, and Samadhi.

Yama deals with social aspects of life, our relationships with others. Niyama is more individualistic, having to do with our relationship with our self. Asanas are the postures that are the most popular visible form of yoga (popular as they can be photographed and are rather dramatic to look at) and deal with our body. External connections

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Pranayama deals with breath. Pratyahara deals with our sense organs, through which we connect with the outside world, enabling us to make the journey from the outer world to the inner world. Dharana is about awareness and perspective, letting our thoughts come and go without trying to control them. Dhyana is about focus where, very consciously and actively, we get our mind to concentrate on a single object, thing, or idea, like chanting. From Dhyana came words like zen in Japan, where yoga spread via Buddhism. Samadhi is the process of connecting with the ultimate.

Relationship of body structure to yogic practices

Sharira (body) Kosha (container) Explanation Yoga Practice

Karana Sharira (social body)

Sthula Sharira (physical body) Relationships Yama Discipline Niyama Anna Body Asana Prana Breath Pranayama

Sukshma Sharira (psychological body) Mana Senses Pratyahara Chitta Emotions Dharana Buddhi Intelligence Dhyana Atma Spirit Samadhi

But what is the ultimate? For some it means going back to the primal source, the atma within (jiva-atma), which is eternally tranquil (ananda), unfettered by hunger and fear, and inhabiting the body. For others, it is looping back and reconnecting with the atma without: God (param-atma), nature (prakriti), culture (sanskriti).

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The word samadhi is also used for the tomb of saints, because saints are believed to have connected with the divine. They don’t die; they simply slip out of their body as a sword slips out of a scabbard. Their body is thus pure, untouched by death. Their tombs then become the focal point where you see the connection between the human and the divine worlds.

Samadhi makes yoga rather mystical. But for many, yoga has an occult side too. The practice of yoga bestows upon the yogi magical powers Yogi seated on a bed of nails known as siddhi, which enable him to change his shape and size, fly in the air, walk on water, grant children to the childless, and defeat demons and witches. Many an Indian folktale speaks of yogis who are at once mystical and deal with the occult. They can voluntarily leave their body, as if it’s a shell, travel around the world and to astral realms, and return at will. Siddhi is linked to semen power, retaining it and reversing its flow up the spine until it sprouts in the brain, an act described in Tantric texts as the uncoiling of the serpent Kundalini and the opening of lotus wheels, or chakras. * * *

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Yogic postures have been traced to 4,000-year-old clay seals from the Harappan period, which depict a man seated in the throne position (Bhadraasana). The word yoga, however, comes from Vedic scriptures composed over 3,000 years ago. Initially, yoga referred to connecting the cart to the horse or Proto-Shiva on the ox. Rishis, or seers, who preferred Harappan seal to live on the edge of society and contemplated on the nature of reality, made yoga a metaphor for spiritual practices. Around 2,500 years ago, with the rise of monastic orders (shramana in Sanskrit) such as Buddhism and Jainism, the meaning of yoga became more metaphorical as it began to refer to various techniques that enabled monks to break free from the hunger and fear that entraps humans in the

Yoke of a bullock cart wheel of rebirth (samsara). The practice granted oblivion (nirvana) to Buddhists, liberation (moksha) to Hindus, omniscience (kaivalya) to Jains, and supernatural powers (siddhi) to Tantrics of all faiths.

When the Puranic stories of Shiva and Shakti were being composed around 2,000 years ago, the Bhagavad Gita, a dialogue found in the epic Mahabharata, spoke of yoga in devotional and

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mystical terms. This was later elaborated by Vedanta scholars as involving the union of the individual soul (jiva-atma) with the cosmic soul (param-atma), an idea that is now being popularized by Indian gurus in the West.

The most popular definition of yoga— chitta vritti nirodha, or unknotting the knots of the mind—was codified about The self (jiva, atma) 1,500 years ago. It is attributed to Patanjali, whom some see as a historical figure, and others see as a mythological figure, as yoga is seen as timeless wisdom, not bound to history or geography. By this time, yoga was linked to tapasya, the practice of churning mental fire (tapa) by hermits. It was also linked to Tantra, occult practices that enabled hermits to control the workings of the cosmos and change the destiny of people. Yoga became not just about wisdom, but also about power.

Nath yogis such as Gorakhnath who lived around 1,000 years ago gave greater emphasis to the physical and the occult side of yoga (siddhi). This was the time when Tantric literature became Yogini popular and we find more and more stories of yoginis, who are both enchanting and fearsome. Circular temples with no roofs

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were built for them, enabling them to fly in and out with ease. Yogis sought to control yoginis, who in turn sought to seduce and domesticate them.

Mainstream yoga, as we know it today, was formalized around the late nineteenth century when Indians, ruled by the British, were increasingly exposed to popular European fitness regimes based on gymnastics. Yoga came to be associated more with physical health than mental health. In the West, religious orders viewed it with suspicion as an “Eastern religious practice,” forcing yoga teachers to play down its spiritual, mystical, occult, and religious angles.

Over the centuries, despite various historical changes, a worldview has persisted, first expressed in Vedic hymns, then in Buddhist, Jain, Vedantic, and Tantric philosophies, and finally in Puranic, Agamic, and Jataka stories. Using fantastic landscape, plots, and characters, this worldview is presented where time and space are without beginning, without end, and always changing, where death is followed by rebirth endlessly. It separates the mind from matter, spirit from substance, the subtle from the gross, the formless from the form, the self from the other, the limitless from the limited. It speaks of how the Yogi mind becomes knotted because of anxiety and fear caused in life, because life frightens us by making demands of us. We have

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