Yoga
is not the simplified western exercise practiced primarily as a mode
of exercise and tension release. Yoga is a system which expands
beyond a simple fad and consumer cycle and to consider it as such is
a grievous miscalculation.
Yoga
is a Sanskrit term, indicating a practice of physical and mental
conditioning capable of producing significant physical and mental
changes.
On
the physical conditioning side, the postures or ASANA (in Sanskrit),
which you see popularized in the west are meant to maintain physical
health and train the mind to focus. There is nothing better than
rigorous exercise to bring you back to basic survival thinking. To
push, stretch and breathe at the edges of your comfort in a cool and
collected manner takes a single-minded focus and helps keep joints,
tendons and muscles in prime condition.
It
is thus in these two ways that ASANA practice provides physical
endurance and improved mental focus.
The
mental conditioning of yoga requires consistent, focused, and
long-term self-analysis. The ancient yogis of lore had nothing but
time on their hands and could thus devote entire lifetimes to such
development of self-awareness.
During
those extended periods of self-analysis, the origins of fear,
attraction, repulsion, ignorance and the egoic I-ness were
discovered. The nature of the observer and the observed were
scrutinized, and the source of cognitive dissonance was sought out.
In
the upper system boundaries of yoga, a yogi could develop a clear
mental holding of the union & separation paradox from which
expanded understanding springs.
In
truth, yoga is a science of idiosyncratic self-discovery. Its
methods shed light on your attachments to ideas and personae. It
questions those attachments and challenges you to rethink them. It
disrupts your patterns and analyzes their existence and usefulness in
the first place.
The
conclusions you draw from yoga are both intimate and universal. The
side effects of which can be more love, more patience, more
directness, more firmness, more action, less talk, better health,
more peace, less discord, deeper character, more compassion, less
delusion, more simplicity, and greater stamina to name a few.
The
only barrier is your self.
