Yoga Sutra: A clear path to inner quietness

All our experiences are internal to us. The objects that we experience may be outside, but the experience itself takes place in our mind, our body, and in our cognition. Yoga being a mental state, is also an experience, but unlike other experiences, it is the wholly internal experience… ...

The Yoga Sutra of Bhagavan Patanjali is a text of just 195 sentences, most of them quite short. Yet, it covers the breadth of psychology, philosophy, and practices of yoga. Understandably, it is a very dense text, with layers of meaning—if we know how to access those layers. To… ...

Yoga has several definitions in ancient yoga texts ranging from the classical Yoga Sutra of Patanjali to the Bhagavad Gita and Yoga Yajnavalkya. Yoga students may have heard statements such as “Yoga is stillness of the mind” or “Yoga is to unite prana and apana” or “Yoga is balance”… ...

In its basic nature, breath is a physical phenomenon. We take in air and push out air with each breath. Our respiratory diaphragm contracts and relaxes, along with other muscles, to make this happen. This act of moving air into and out of the lungs is technically called “ventilation” in… ...

To create meaningful change in our lives, we need to make conscious effort in that direction. We will face resistance in making that change because of our past patterns. Our mind, body, and senses have their own patterns that are often in opposition to the change we wish to… ...

An effective holistic wellbeing and therapeutic approach should cover important domains of wellbeing, as far as reasonably possible. The scope of coverage should not be limited to just a few aspects of the person e.g., only movement or only nutrition or only cognition. Further, such comprehensive modeling should ideally… ...

Philosophy can be broadly defined as the study of the nature of life, as we live and experience it and beyond. Psychology is the study of our human mind and behavior. Practices are the actions we do to actualize desired changes in our life. All these three—philosophy, psychology, and practices—are… ...

The heart of classical hatha yoga (~physical yoga) is not asana: it is pranayama. In the traditional pathway of practice, the work that we do in asana is a platform to guide us towards more subtle engagement with our body with pranayama as the next step. When we rest our… ...

On the topic of yoga in life management, some may believe it is only for monks or those leading an unconventional life. This is not true, despite some traditional schools of thought emphasizing monastic life as the path to the highest realization of the self. To be useful to everyone,… ...

Yoga presents a two-fold approach to the path of self-transformation, termed abhyasa and vairagya. The first, abhyasa, is what we do to progress towards the goal of yoga. The second, vairagya, is that we move away from things that disrupt our yoga path. The details of abhyasa and vairagya… ...