My father was really into yoga, and back then, it seemed like we were really the only ones who knew about yoga. It amazes me now... just what a movement yoga has become and what an industry it's become.
Yoga, an ancient but perfect science, deals with the evolution of humanity. This evolution includes all aspects of one's being, from bodily health to self realization. Yoga means union - the union of body with consciousness and consciousness with the soul. Yoga cultivates the ways of maintaining a balanced attitude in day to day life and endows skill in the performance of one's actions.
I really think there's an evolution to the practice and the individual no matter what brings you in, whether it's wine and yoga or chocolate and yoga or surfing and yoga.
I have written and spoken my thoughts over many years. Now I'm on new ground and spirit. I want to bring these together. Things like karma yoga, bhakti yoga, conscious dying, conscious aging. Consciousness.
My father first brought yoga into my life when I was 7. He began yoga, meditation, and diet to help with his back injuries incurred from being really athletic. Once he healed, he began to use yoga to take his body to a new level.
We see not only thought as participating in evolution as an anomaly or as an epiphenomenon; but evolution as so reducible to and identifiable with a progress towards thought that the movement of our souls expresses and measures the very stages of progress of evolution itself. Man discovers that he is nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself.
Life must always go on and Yoga is not about an escape from life. Yoga's about a way of dealing with life more effectively; to be able to involve oneself with one's family, one's friends, one's social commitments, one's job and yet at the same time maintain one's centre.
Yoga is many things to many people, but in its full potential the practice of yoga can provide the means to transform suffering into happiness and Suzanne Bryant's film YOGA IS shows us this path.
I always tell people, I can't teach you yoga. Nobody can teach you yoga. I can't teach you to teach yoga. All I can do is teach you a set of instructions and if you follow these instructions, hopefully it will lead you to the experience of yoga.
There are four principal pathways that lead to enlightement: The yoga of love, the yoga of service, the yoga of knowledge, and the yoga of mysticism.
Yoga is not a practice - the word 'yoga' means union. It does not mean standing on your head, twisting your body, or holding your breath. Yoga means to know the union of life. When you experience everything as a part of yourself, you are in yoga.
It is important not to abandon the practice of yoga because we believe it is driven by the wrong motivation. The practice of yoga itself transforms. Yoga has a magical quality.
We cannot expect that millions are practicing real yoga just because millions of people claim to be doing yoga all over the globe. What has spread all over the world is not yoga. It is not even non-yoga; it is un-yoga.
Yoga is a big misnomer in the west, people don't know what this yoga is. Yoga means union with the divine. When you become one with the divine, the divine starts flowing through you and you become part and parcel of the whole.
The idea of the mystic solo, meditating away on his own, is only one path of yoga. Very early on, I chose the path of Life. One path is austerity and isolation, the other is Life. But they both lead to the same place.
The "Bhagavad Gita" is actually a very good text for yoga - the yoga of love, the yoga of action or karma, the yoga of understanding of intellect, and the yoga of reflection and meditation. I think it's a very important map for understanding the nature of consciousness.