What is Yoga?To me, the ultimate and most important reason for doing yoga is to discover, know, live in and express, the truth and reality that our true nature is the Soul, and that the Soul is one with, and a manifestation of God. Yoga is a process of purification that dispels, dissolves, and removes the things that obscure or obstruct the knowing and expression of this truth.The word yoga means union. Uniting with what? There are several ways to look at it. We can look at yoga as uniting body, breath and awareness, or as uniting and harmonizing the various levels of our being: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. The deeper and more profound understanding of yoga would be conscious unity of our small waking consciousness with our Soul consciousness, and ultimately conscious unity of the wave of our Soul with the Ocean of God’s Consciousness. My Baba Paramahamsa Hariharanandaji uttered my favorite definition of yoga: "Yoga is single minded devotion to God". He also said: "Yoga is seeing, feeling and experiencing God in every moment, in every breath, in everyone and everything". |