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.
When people come to Yoga, they are perhaps coming to it at the end of a long series of alternatives, and they're looking for something that's going to act very quickly. But Yoga is not a quick answer.
Yoga aims to bring about a situation where the mind is quieter and more effective. It's not only about relaxation, it's also about improving our energy. It's about making us more decisive and at the same time better able to judge a situation clearly.
For me the breath really is the tool which allows you to understand what's happening on the mental level and what's happening on the emotional level, and it also allows you to measure what's happening on a physical level.
Breath is perhaps the first thing we have in life. It's how we measure the starting of life and it's how we measure the ending of life.
The breath is seen to be the key between the emotional state, the mental state and physical state. It is perhaps the most important tool, and it's one whose importance is underestimated in the West.
My own interest in Yoga came from a vague understanding of Indian thought and Indian philosophy in the late sixties and early seventies and from looking at the idea of meditation and at what meditation was.
Yoga is a product of Eastern thought. A further complication is that the early Yoga teachers were both Indian and Hindu. So from the late 1800's and early 1900's the Yoga teachers who came across were as interested in Hinduism as in Yoga. Often what we were being taught was a mixture of two different systems.
Everything you use in a modern life style has to be made using a tool of some sort.
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