I have a friend and yoga student interviewing me about yoga tomorrow. She knows that I have taught yoga for 20 years, and that I lived in India for 25 years. I was telling her this morning that Yoga actually began a long, long time ago in India, with teachings from a scripture called ‘Patanjali Yog Darshan’ The first sutra (verse) says, “Yoga begins now.” This is really the essence of yoga-living in the eternal now. Yoga was never just about building a strong, flexible body. The ancient seers and rishis of India would not have seen the point in that. What good is a great body if you don’t know who you are? What good are beauty, riches, fame, or power, if you think you are just this body-mind that is going to die someday?

The whole purpose of yoga was to cultivate the relationship between the body and mind, and bring the whole being into a state of natural harmony. Then a state of ease and clarity emerges that can support meditation, inquiry and awakening. Awakening to what? To our true nature, our unconditional being.

I noticed this after practicing yoga for many years in India. It was no longer the state of my body that was the focus of my attention, but the clarity, stillness and aliveness that opened up in me during a yoga session.

It can be very interesting to watch the relationship between the body and the mind. I often ask my yoga students to pay close attention to what is unfolding in their inner landscape as they practice. As the body and mind come into harmony, we begin to access our unconditioned being. People experience this in different ways. It can feel like peace, openness, compassion, clarity, joy, power, aliveness….the same being expressing itself in all these essential qualities, like the sun shining through the facets of a diamond.

More about yoga in the next blog