What is yoga? Yoga in the west is thought of as postures. Yoga means to yoke and it is bringing the body mind and spirit together as one. It incorporates breathing techniques, postures called asanas and sound techniques to direct the mind towards an object and sustain.
I think here in the west, people think yoga is the actual postures, and the yoga sutras define yoga as the ability to direct the mind towards an object and sustain that direction without distraction. The postures and the breath techniques and the sound techniques and all of the things that you see, that you can visually see or hear are really tools that we use in order to discipline the mind. The asanas, the physical postures, are there to bring a sense of easefulness in the body and also to prepare the body for the breath techniques. What we want to do is try to deepen our inhalation or lengthen our exhalation, and we use these postures to create more space in the body to do that.
And so you've got your asanas, your postures, your body is ready, your breath is ready, now you're doing this sound, further, further the mind is getting more and more stable to prepare for meditation or contemplation. And that's what yoga is, to me. The word yoga actually means 'to yoke,' so they're talking about this body, mind, spirit coming together as one. So the way I teach is first bringing your awareness to the fact that you're breathing, so that's taking your awareness from the external to the internal and allowing your awareness and your breath to kind of merge. And then we merge it with some movement. And so it brings those three things together.
