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What is Yoga?
Many people have tried to define what yoga is. I've been practicing it for a while now and, honestly, I don't know. I do know what my experience of it has been, however. And maybe I can communicate that.
People new to yoga see a bunch of oddballs contorting their bodies into strange "pretzely" shapes and impossible positions. I know, because I was one of those people. My older sister was doing yoga long before I picked it up, and seeing her do these impossible postures, I thought to myself, "Whatever it is she's doing, all I know is that I can't." I tried a few of the asanas I saw her practicing... and failed miserably. So the more she spoke of yoga, and tried to convince me it was worth trying, the more I stayed away from it. I for one wasn't going to go and join a class of people bending their bodies into shapes I couldn't even imagine.
Yoga isn't contortionism. In the end, Peg convinced me to take my first class by telling me not about all the incredible things she'd learned to do with her body through her yoga practice, but by talking about Savasana (corpse pose). "It's not hard at all, Rob! There's one pose where all you have to do is lay on your back for fifteen minutes!". This was intriguing, "That's it?" I asked skeptically, "No twisting? No balancing on one foot? No tying yourself in knots?" But she was adamant, "If you try to do any of those things, you'll get in trouble, because you'll be doing it wrong! All you have to do is nothing."
So I went along with her. I found out that while she was right about Savasana, laying on my back for fifteen minutes (as a kid diagnosed with ADD among other things) wasn't quite as easy as it sounded. And certainly there was more to the class than that. It was hard and challenging, but I came out of it with a feeling of peacefulness, openness, and strength that I hadn't ever felt before. I was hooked.
It's been quite a while now. In the intervening years my body has undergone immense changes, from a scrawny teenager to a fit yogi. My awareness of my body has grown immensely as well, and I feel like I go deeper into it with every yoga practice. Flexibility, strength, stamina, they've all come through my asana practice. I feel an internal health that comes from bodily cleansing, and for someone who was faced with health problems his whole life, this has been an immense relief.
The health and changes in my body that came from yoga had their side effects. I can do those impossible contortions I was once so intimidated by. But that's far from the big picture. My mind that once raced around from one thought to the next, like a bee searching for honey, has calmed. I've developed confidence... and maybe even a little fearlessness. I've spent a year and a half travelling who was once afraid to leave home. I won't go into all the mental and emotional changes wrought by this practice: they're private, personal things, but they have been immense. I certainly don't understand everything now, but spiritually.. I'm a little more at peace, less striving for answers and more willing to let life offer them up in it's own time.
So I don't know exactly what yoga is, or where exactly it's taking me, except maybe to say, closer to myself.