Yoga . . . has by now become a comfortable English word, though in its more physical sense as physical or Hatha Yoga. In the Gītā, it has a wide range of meanings: path, practice, discipline, and meditation, among others. Restricting it to ’discipline’ alone would be an impoverishment.
—Stephen Mitchell, Introduction to the Bhagavad Gītā
YOGA AS A PATH is the way out of our present conditioning and the way toward freedom from habitually ensnaring conditions—a practice and philosophy described in widely diverse ways in texts such as the early Vedas, the Yoga-Sutra and the Bhagavad Gītā. In an Indian sense, the opposite of saṁsāra is an open space of possibility in which we can flourish and transcend where we are stuck.
Freedom only has impact if we understand it as liberation from an unfree condition. Freedom is always “freedom from.” Enlightenment is a movement in which we free ourselves from what obstructs and entraps us.
What constitutes the path of yoga? First, there is a sense that there is in fact a path. The Sanskrit term for “path” is mārga, which can refer to a trail, road, or sense of direction. The root marg means “to seek” or “to strive,” linked also to the verbal root mrj, meaning “to pursue a particular direction.” Likewise, a spiritual path offers us a sense of direction. A path gives us a clear trail to follow. Just as when walking in a dense forest it’s hard to get around without some sort of path, in the spiritual life, we gain an intuitive sense of the path because we know intuitively when we’re off the path. Even if you don’t know what spiritual path you are on, you can certainly feel when you’ve swayed from a beneficial way.
A path also denotes that others have traveled before us. In the Aṣṭāṅga Vinyasa system of Pattabhi Jois or the method of posture sequencing taught by B.K.S. Iyengar, one finds a map of sequences that are almost identical. Their teacher, Kṛṣṇamacharya, was taught this sequence by Ramamohan Brahmacari in a cave in Tibet, and also saw diagrams of posture sequences illustrated in a now-lost text called the Yoga Koruntha, reported to have been found in a library in Calcutta. Simply in terms of practice technique, a path is created by tradition and the testing out and refinement of tradition as it comes alive in the present experience of a practitioner.
Another feature of a path is that there are signs, markers, and instructions that help orient us in the landscape of the journey, a landscape often encumbered by the self-imposed ideas we create about ourselves and others. There are meditation techniques, ethics, and alignment principles that help guide us, depending on where we are within the features of the landscape, so that we can wake up to the landscape itself, only to see that landscape and practitioner are nothing other than relative categories and that the path of yoga moves beyond such categories as it ripens. Walking up a slope, or down a steep hill, or getting across a river all require different sorts of techniques. In addition, the lifestyle of a householder, a monk, a teenager, a single person, or even a man or a woman may differ, requiring different sensitivities from a teacher. When our son was born, my daily routine of three hours of early-morning āsana practice had to change. Not only did I not sleep for almost a year, there was an increased sensitivity to what others needed. Parenting became a matter of meeting necessity. If I continued to cling to my expectation of my previous form of practice, there would be suffering for myself and my family, and certainly I did not even have the stamina to practice yoga postures after many nights without sleep. It’s important to have a path that is appropriate to the practitioner. A path is a mode of being in the world that is practical and accessible, yet challenges our tendency to maintain our habitual grooves of comfort. The heart always seeks a path out of discontent, but the mind and body always put up some resistance. Freud describes the path of psychotherapy in a similar way when he says that “resistance follows every step of the way.”1 However, it is equally important to remember that paying attention to what is here—the workings of the mind with its categories, judgments, and ideas about things—is the very path itself, the route and even the means.
The path of yoga is concerned with inner freedom, and there are many ways and methods of practice within the various schools of yoga. There are many different approaches to practice, sometimes even within each school, but the approach that I am distilling here has to do with freedom from the suffering inherent in saṁsāra, a practice that begins in the body, breath, and mind, and forms the basic axiom of yoga. Although there seem to be two worlds—the life of everyday chores and the disciplined dedication to formal practice—the two are not separate at all. In fact, these two sides of the yogi’s life intertwine to become the very path itself, with no aspect of life separate from yoga, and yoga not separate from any thought, action, or deed. Our whole life gets rolled into practice each and every step of the way. Waking up is not an improvement of reality but rather direct contact with it.
Yoga is the practice of finding within ourselves freedom from being caught in impermanent and limited situations. In some respects we can’t escape those conditions. But we can be less invested in them. Freedom is living in such a way that we are not hemmed in by, frosted with, or entangled in life’s situations. We learn to preserve an inner psychological stillness of nonreactivity and ethical action, which is equivalent to freedom. Symptoms of conditioning are not only reflections of a world out of balance, but are the means by which we see the world. Jealousy is not just a manifestation of multiply determined causes but a mode of perception through which we see and eventually act. The poisons of greed, hatred, jealousy, and so on are not just symptoms that affect how we feel but on a deeper level they become, over time, the mode through which we feel. The light by which the world reflects in and through us is always modified by our conditioning, influencing not just what we perceive but how we perceive. Pattabhi Jois describes Patañjali’s description of the five kleṣas as the means by which we can see how the symptoms of the heart shade and pervert our sensual experience of day-to-day living in mind and body.
Enlightenment (mokṣa) is here and now. It occurs when we free ourselves from ego clinging and become more transparent, letting go of the armoring, carapace, or protection that we think of as ourselves, dissolving any separation with the greater world. This means opening up to our own suffering as well as to the discontent in the world around us. At that point, our spiritual practice rises to the level of asking, How can I be so concerned with my own spiritual practice when there is so much suffering in the world? How can we live a life that can optimally benefit others? The long point of the opus of this process is seeing the self out of balance in a world out of balance, so that we practice to harmonize both, because they are not, as we once thought, separate from each other. Through removing the centrality of “me,” we open up to the world at large so that internal and external, inner and outer, me and you, become conceptual designations only, not the reality of felt experience, which is not two but one.
The path of yoga helps us find an authentic and meaningful response to having been born and ultimately having to die. Opening up to this truth can be terrifying; it can also open us up to the amazing promise that yoga offers: freedom from trying to create permanence in an ever-changing existence. Although our core beliefs make us feel secure and somewhat unchanging, yoga practice opens us to the reality of being an ever-changing flow of conditions arising and passing away, and completely empty of any trace of permanence except for the truth of relational existence. The basis of everything is boundless.
Beginning with body, mind, and breath as they are experienced in the present moment, yoga practice deals with the common hypnotic state of suffering and a conditioned existence in which we find ourselves spinning. This unconsciousness has, as a result, chronic physical and psychological holding patterns. Once we begin to see the way our conditions are constructed, we begin taking them apart until the very last conditional pattern is revealed: clinging to the notions of “I, me, and mine.” In finding freedom from the captive consequences of “me” and “mine,” we no longer experience reality as an isolated self. Then we become not only better able to relate to our conditioned existence, but more engaged in the interconnected world of relationships and thus the complex and heartfelt domain of action, compassion, and ethical responsibility.