My teacher, Bhavani Maki, looked at us and said, “In business it is important to cultivate and rely on people’s strengths. This establishes a good, working foundation and people feel good about their accomplishments. We want people to excel in business. In the context of yoga, however, it is different. In the domain of spirit-work and transformation is important to go against or “natural” impulses, urges, tendencies, and talents in order to strengthen the elements in ourselves that are raw and even unknown to us. In the context of yoga we turn toward the difficult, unseen elements in order to bring them into the light.”
This is the fundamental difference between our “inner life work” and our “work in the world.” And in my experience “the world” is fodder for our “inner work.”
Context matters. It is everything. We have to be aware of which domain we are working in. The way I was trained yoga is not about self-improvement or even “self-care,” (more on that later). Yoga is not about setting goals and getting better and better every day in every way. I learned that yoga is union: it is the hard heart work of crawling back into the lap of the divine, of reconciling the split within ourselves between our essential nature and our crude existence; it is resolution between what we think and life as it is here and now. Yoga is our willingness to see beyond our likes and dislikes and lean into a much larger network of relationship.
Yoga is a big, broad term used by many people to describe a variety of endeavors and practices. In essence, the way I have learned yoga from my teachers (back to the necessity of having a lineage) is that Yoga means “to yoke,” to yoke ourselves to the healing/unifying elements present in ourselves and present in the natural world of which we are part. Ultimately bringing ourselves into greater alignment (which means different things for different people depending on our karmas and constitutions).
Yoga is an action, it is the effort required to heal the psycho-spiritual split that occurs when we signed up to transform in this lifetime as a human being. Yoga is a path toward maturation. Yoga is a continual stepping into the current of Grace. Yoga is union with Divine Nature.