I had a teacher once ask that question during a particularly challenging Yoga class
back in New York. We were all bent into these exhausting sideways triangles
and the teacher was making us hold the position longer than any of us would have liked.
"Why do we practice Yoga?" he asked again. "Is it so we can bee a little bendier than our neighbors? Or is there perhaps some higher purpose?"
“我們為什麽練瑜伽？”他再壹次問，“是否讓妳比妳的鄰居更‘能屈能伸’？或者為了某種更崇高的目的？”
Yoga
in Sanskrit
can be translated as "union." It originally es from the root word yuj
which means "to yoke
" to attach yourself to a task at hand with ox-like discipline. And the task at hand in Yoga is to find union—beeen mind and body
beeen the individual and her God
beeen our thoughts and the source of our thoughts
beeen teacher and student
and even beeen ourselves and our sometimes hard-to-bend neighbors. In the West
we've mainly e to know Yoga through its now-famous pretzel-like exercises for the body
but this is only Hatha Yoga
one limb of the philosophy. The ancients developed these physical stretches not for personal fitness
but to loosen up their muscles and minds in order to prepare them for meditation. It is difficult to sit in stillness for many hours
after all
if your hip is aching
keeping you from contemplating your intrinsic divinity because you are too busy contemplating
"Wow . . . my hip really aches."
But Yoga can also mean trying to find God through meditation
through scholarly study
through the practice of silence
through devotional service or through mantra—the repetition of sacred words in Sanskrit. While some of these practices tend to look rather Hindu in their derivation
Yoga is not synonymous with Hindui ***
nor are all Hindus Yogis. True Yoga neither petes with nor precludes any other religion. You may use your Yoga—your disciplined practices of sacred union—to get closer to Krishna
Jesus
Muhammad
Buddha or Yahweh. During my time at the Ashram
I met devotees who identified themselves as practicing Christians
Jews
Buddhists
Hindus and even Muslims. I have met others who would rather not talk about their religious affiliation at all
for which
in this contentious world
you can hardly blame them.
The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition
which I'm going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. Different schools of thought over the centuries have found different explanations for man's apparently inherently flawed state. Taoists call it imbalance
Buddi *** calls it ignorance
Islam blames our misery on rebellion against God
and the Judeo-Christian tradition attributes all our suffering to original sin. Freudians say that unhappiness is the inevitable result of the clash beeen our natural drives and civilization's needs. (As my friend Deborah the psychologist explains it: "Desire is the design flaw.") The Yogis
however
say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity. We're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals
alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character. We don't realize that
somewhere within us all
there does exist a supreme Self who is eternally at peace. That supreme Self is our true identity
universal and divine. Before you realize this truth
say the Yogis
you will always be in despair
a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: "You bear God within you
poor wretch
and know it not."