The True Purpose of Yoga and How to Achieve It

What is the purpose of yoga?

The true purpose of yoga is quite simple. It is also the purpose of life itself. We are all simply longing to experience some joy, some pleasure, some true happiness.

There is so much misery in the world and even if we do not personally have any legitimate reason to complain, we still struggle to find peace, contentment, fulfillment or true happiness.

According to yoga, true happiness is not found in the external world. It is not found through the sensations of the body or the external achievements we pursue. True happiness results from the connection with our essential inner nature. According to yoga our internal self is naturally blissful.

Sensual pleasures and life achievements can give us a glimpse of this internal bliss. Pleasures and achievements temporarily remove the stress, the pain, the struggle that obscures the blissful inner nature - but these moments of happiness are quickly obliterated by the day to day struggles for survival.

Why do we struggle so hard? Why is there so much stress, thankless work, misery and heartbreak? It is because we value the wrong things in life. We pursue what does not truly serve us, we pursue what only ultimately causes us more pain.

It is perhaps not so much just the wrong object we pursue, but the emotion with which we pursue this object, that causes so much misery.

There are so many examples of two people who are doing the same job - one is totally content, fulfilled, happy, while the other is miserable, complains and is never satisfied. To be sure, we all have different needs, skills and personalities - one thing will satisfy one individual but not another. But the key difference is attitude. There is the what but also the how.

This equally applies to yoga.

Which practice are you doing and how are you doing it? Is one practice authentic, while another is defective? Are two people doing the same practice getting the same experience or does it depend on the how?

What determines the how?

The way one practices is related to what one wishes to achieve from practice - one's goals, expectations, assumptions - one's understanding of what is possible, what the intended purpose of practice and the way to achieve it.

The original purpose of yoga is to help one to connect with the authentic true inner self. But we have lost contact both with this purpose and with the means to achieve it.

Today, yoga is mostly used for its physical benefits. We also recognize that the physical stretching and exercising has positive psychological consequences - it also produces temporary relaxation - but this stress release is only temporary.

This is because the physical practices are more geared towards physical benefits and the modern idea that we are nothing but our minds and bodies. We have lost contact with the idea that there is also a transcendental element, an element that is non-material.

Mind is housed in this physical body - it is experienced through the brain, nervous and endocrine systems, through the heart beat and breath, through the fascia, through the gut, the sex organs... and is influenced by the food we eat, the sense impressions we receive from our environment, our memories of past experiences... These are all material causes - the mind is intimately connected with the material nature of the body.

But the soul is transcendental, non-material, consciousness only, eternal, unchanging, bliss-filled, aware and the true nature of our reality. Mind is just a movie that consciousness is experiencing. Consciousness is not truly touched, not changed, not modified by what it experiences.

To know oneself as soul, spirit, pure consciousness, liberates one from the tyranny of the conditioned existence, the misery and pain of mind and body.

But how or when can one be with consciousness in isolation from the changing nature of mind and body?

Only in moments of deep peace can one feel this truth.

Even though we may assiduously apply ourselves to yoga practice, to spiritual practice, if we do not have the goal in mind, if we do not have access to practice that would take us there, if we apply our stress and attachment to achieving such goals - they will elude us.

We need enlightened guidance. We need authentic technique. We need to understand the target, its location and the means to achieve it.

We will not find it on Instagram. We will not find it through famous gurus. We will not find it through intense practices, physical self-torture or punishment. The nature of yoga is deep peace. The technique to reach peace is a peaceful means, not a method of struggle and sweat that engenders disappointment and failure to achieve on a physical level.

"One who attempts to cross the ocean of samsara with an attachment to the physical body is like someone who grasps hold of a crocodile to avoid drowning, thinking it is a log and gets consumed by the vicious creature before reaching the other shore." - Sri Shankarachrya

Practicing yoga with an attachment only to physical achievement results only in misery.

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Yoga should lead to a deep Self-knowledge, a profound experience of the essential Self - it was not intended simply as exercise. But today, yoga is seen as a physical thing and the proper theory behind asana practice has been lost - as a result, practice does not lead to deep inner peace and clarity, but more often, the most we can expect from practice is bodily fitness and health.

However true health is not just physical. True health is also psychological but also something beyond psychological - true health includes a regular experience of the transcendental state - the condition of pure being beyond body and mind - the condition of pure consciousness.

This is known as samadhi. Samadhi is not an obscure or difficult to achieve experience. Most of us do have momentary glimpses of it. Most of us have experienced isolated more extended periods of this condition. The soul or spirit is the ground of being - it is obscured by the stresses and pain of life - but it is revealed, uncovered in moments of deep peace.

Samadhi is refreshing for the mind in the same way that sleep is refreshing for the body. Samadhi is a re-boot to the system. We should all experience it with regularity in order to find and maintain true health and happiness.

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Most modern gurus lost their way, and most Western teachers have been following these lost leaders, and so yoga, even yoga that claims to be traditional, is mostly quite ineffective. This includes teachers like Pattabhi Jois who became quite enamored with the physical body and the physicality of practice.

After decades of practice with the Pattabhi Jois' method, after extensive research that included in depth interviews with all the senior practitioners of his method, I came to the firm conclusion that his method was missing something, an essential ingredient and an authentic original source.

Eventually it became clear that Pattabhi Jois created his own system, no doubt, with great respect and deference to his own teacher - T Krishnamacharya, but there is no question that the method he taught was a modern invention.

Although, for most of his life, Pattabhi Jois claimed that his method came from an ancient sources, he eventually admitted that he had created it himself. Claiming this ancient origin is a good marketing strategy but is misleading. Ashtanga teachers continue to spin this deception - it adds value to the product. The method is modern, not ancient.

Pattabhi Jois created the sequences as a curriculum for the course he taught at the Maharaja's Sanskrit College in Mysore. It was a four year program with four sequences of postures. The sequences are a catalogue of physical postures - not a ladder to the achievement of higher or deeper aspects of yoga.

The system is a bit like learning the alphabet or playing musical scales, but at some point you would wish to go beyond reciting your ABC's and start making meaningful words or sentences, you would wish to go beyond just playing scales and make actual music.

The ashtanga practice has many good features - it is a good way to learn the asanas, a good way to develop flexibility and to begin to explore yoga practice, but it lacks certain important attributes and techniques that can take the practitioner towards the true goal.

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Workshop: Yoga as a Spiritual Practice
All Eight Limbs - The True Practice of Ashtanga Yoga

https://www.ashtangayoga.nyc/workshops

I feel extremely fortunate to have received guidance from teachers who are highly enlightened about the true goal of yoga practice and who have retained or re-discovered some of the original teachings about the practical methods.

Drawing on many years experience both with the Pattabhi Jois method and with these genuine sources, these teachings may act as a bridge for practitioners of Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga, or from any yoga tradition for that matter, to a practice that leads to the true goal - through authentic asana, pranayama, pratyahra, dharana, dhyana to samadhi.

Yoga is not for exercise - it should lead one to an experience of the true nature of being, the essential Self - yoga should lead to Samadhi - the highest state. The result is deep peace, insight, bliss and true health.

Over the five sessions we will explore the true and original purpose and practice of asana, the subtle nature of breath, the introversion of awareness, the settling of mind as it starts to flow exclusively towards the goal and its ultimate merging with the target. All Eight Limbs - an integration of the whole system of Ashtanga Yoga.