Gurudev shared the following insights about how yoga is a technology of life that goes beyond physical exercise. 

Yoga is not just postures

Yoga is emotional integration and spiritual elevation with a touch of mysticism. It gives you a glimpse beyond all imagination. 

Yoga is a complete science uniting body, mind, spirit, and the universe for peace and ecstasy. Not only that, it impacts behavior, thoughts, and attitudes.

A baby is the best yogi

Every baby is a yogi. If you look at a baby, you’ll see the postures. But a baby exhibits all these qualities of a yogi: attitude, breathing, perceptual ability, sharpness, and the ability to stay in the present moment.

A yogi isn't someone who has to have long hair, but is skillful, serene, happy, content, and like a child. 

It’s not being childish or avoiding growing up. It’s childlike simplicity and freshness, without mental inhibition or arrogance. It’s sincerity and fearlessness. Healthy children aren’t afraid. There’s also keenness of observation. 

Is yoga a religious practice?

Yoga belongs to the whole of humanity. You can’t limit any knowledge on the planet to geographical conditions. If you limit it that way, then it loses its universality, magnanimity, and dignity. 

Is technology against any religion? Yoga is a technology enabling you to be more energetic, happy, and compassionate. 

Which religion says you shouldn’t be compassionate, happy, friendly, and loving? When yoga removes stress, anger, greed, and other negative emotions, how can you think this is against religion? 

Yoga gives people freedom to think. The purpose and goal of faith is to bring peace, love, freedom, and a sense of belongingness to the whole planet. Yoga is the technology with which to achieve these goals of faith.

Yoga is skill in action

Yoga has been defined by Patanjali as skill in action. Yoga is the skill to keep your spirit uplifted, your energy not drained, and yet, the job gets done. Usually, when you work, you tend to exhaust yourself. By the time you see results, you can’t enjoy them because you’re totally drained and devastated.

Yoga is that skill that keeps your spirit alive and energy high. It brings you achievements. 

Can there be yoga without meditation?

Meditation is like the soul and everything else is like a dressing on it. This is the real substance. You can’t have a body without a soul and you can’t have just a soul without the body. 

Some people think that they have to master non-violence, truth, and all of the personal and social ethics of yoga, and then someday they can attain spiritual bliss. But the limbs of yoga develop simultaneously. If one could only achieve one part of yoga at a time, Patanjali would’ve said there were eight steps to yoga instead of eight limbs of yoga. 

In the womb, a baby doesn’t develop the legs first and then the arms and head. All the limbs develop simultaneously. 

We have eight limbs of yoga, not eight steps to yoga. With steps, you master one at a time. 

You can also start with meditation and then truth, non-violence, and everything becomes part of your life. 

Wonder is important 

Ancient rishis have said that a sense of wonder is a preface for yoga. When observation of yourself and nature creates a “Wow!” in you, then mysticism, connection to something ethereal, dawns. Something beautiful, concrete, yet very abstract happens.

If you don’t wonder, you’re not a yogi. The wonderment that anyone faces anywhere will lead them to yoga. 

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Editor’s note:
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