Yoga is…not what you think
Our whole lives are about moving fast — about efficiency, about speeding up processes, cutting costs, saving time, and so on. At work, you try and move as fast as possible. At home? Well, you’re rushing around trying to juggle everything, so moving fast isn’t even a choice.
This mentality permeates our every day lives. It even flows into the way we exercise — we go to the gym and do fast-paced HIIT classes, or we go for an early morning run, or we lift heavy weights.
And if we’re really honest with ourselves, many of us do all of the above because we ‘have to’. Of course, people come to love their morning runs and their gym sessions, eventually — but it’s our view that oftentimes, it’s more of an addiction to speed, action and outcome, than it is a true love for the routine as an end in itself.
Ask yourself, when was the last time you did a form of exercise as an end in itself, not as a means to an end? Have you ever?
This is one of the reasons why yoga is such a therapeutic form of exercise. It’s not about moving fast, and it’s not about moving slow. It is not about ‘getting your steps in’, or looking a certain way, and it is not — contrary to popular belief — about being super flexible.
As any experienced yogi and teacher will tell you, yoga is not about the body — at least not solely. It is in fact about the ‘cessation of the mind’ through the body.
If it weren’t for your thoughts, would you have any problems?
That’s a weird question to ask — and answer. But yes, you read it right.
What we’re trying to convey is the fact that most of the supposed ‘problems’ we face in life begin in the mind:
If you couldn’t think about that stressful project at work, you wouldn’t find yourself wide awake at 3am in the morning.
If you couldn’t think about the fact your mortgage interest rates were rapidly increasing, you wouldn’t be tense and snappy at home.
If you couldn’t think about what you don’t have, what you want to have, and so on and so forth — you wouldn’t feel so unhappy and discontented.
This is not to say there are no real problems. We need to put food on the table, we need to take care of the kids, our parents, grandparents, etc etc. All those things are real — but it’s thinking about them excessively that creates the unhappiness.
So, the solution to our problems lies in reducing our brain activity — that is, the ‘cessation of the mind’, as Patanjali says — and this is the whole purpose of yoga.