"What is Yoga to You?"

I was recently asked the following question: "What is yoga to you?"

This is a question I have been asked--and have asked myself--for the many decades I have been practicing.

I can tell you that the answer has changed over the years.

There are the classic definitions we may already know. Like this one from the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: "Yogah Cittavrtti Nirodhah," or "Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind." Or The Bhagavad Gita where one could say: "Yogah Cittavrtti Krishnah," or "Yoga is the heart/mind absorbed in Lord Krishna" (according to scholar Edwin Bryant).  We also hear that Yoga is union. Union with what? God? What if you are agnostic or an atheist? Does it mean union with everything? Some would say yes; others would say no. The debate will go on. I like the question I was asked:

What is yoga to YOU?
For now, I choose to define yoga as the art of integration. 

For me, almost anything can be a type of yoga. It has more to do with my mindstate and the way that I am experiencing experience, than what I am actually doing (sitting, breathing, moving). 

In terms of asana, I am interested in cultivating effortless effort. Even when things are hard, unpredictable, and challenging, I try to find some semblance of ease and stability. This is Patanjali's definition of asana that many of you know: stability and ease.

Does that mean I don't wobble, or struggle? No, I do. But I try to recognize it, appreciate that, and use the tools of yoga (and other practices) to help regain a sense of equilibrium and in the largest sense of the word. I like that process. 

I try not to get caught up in results. Process is everything.

That might mean noticing how I am using my eyes, or my breathing, or how I am relating physically to the external environment or how I am relating to the messages I am getting from my inner environment. These are examples of interoception, proprioception, and exteroception. These are inputs that my nervous system must process. How I receive, process, and respond to these inputs in complex in itself, but consistent practice can influence our responses to a certain degree, and how we respond to our own response, especially when it is more reflexive or not what we intended. We are human. We are a complex biological system. Maybe we are more than that. I don't know.

I do know that I like to play with how yoga (again, for me, an art of integration) can influence the many things that I like to do, like dance, or train, or travel, or be with other people--as well as the things I don't like to do. Especially those.

Yoga is, for me, like an open sky, or a huge tree, or a person with arms wide open.

It is a soft smile of appreciation and a sense that this dance we are privileged to take part in is but a mystery. No matter what our dance is, who we dance with, or where, or how, we do it...the dance is bigger than us. The yoga is bigger than us. It is us and it includes us. ALL OF US. It is everything that we have been, is, and will be. I like to rest in this expansiveness. This awareness. This too, for me, is yoga. 

What about you?