Yoga has become a cultural movement, no doubt. And as with everything in our world, there is duality. There are side effects of the yoga wave, which are positive, like the added health benefits for example. However, it also serves as a tool to quench the unreasonable thirst for materialism. There are teachers who teach yoga very well and others who pretend to be teachers, they are just following the trend and high demand. Good and bad, like everywhere. But how can I, as a consumer, evaluate that? What are those yoga lessons where I feel more balanced afterwards?
In order to be able to evaluate something, you have to know what the aim of your practice is. The closer you can come to that aim during a lesson, the better the teacher. So what is the aim of Yoga?
If you go back to the Yoga Sutras, the text on which most of today’s yoga styles are based, you can read what the main goal of yoga is:
PEOPLE SHOULD FREE THEMSELVES
Free themselves from fear, from pathological clinging to past events, from their own controlling minds. But how can we achieve that? Through awareness, right. By not letting our mind control ourselves but by controlling our thoughts. Man should become free through consciousness.
Even if the vast majority of the different yoga practices offers people added value through the physical activation anyways, there is a lack of guidance, explanation, how to liberate ourselves during the practice. This is mainly dure to the fact that one of the most important components of yoga is completely disregarded or not emphasized enough: >>THE BREATH<<
Breathing does not only mean in- and exhaling oxygen into our body, but breathing gives us access to life energy. We are not existing without the breath. The control of the breath is not a casual practice accessory of yoga, but rather an indispensable higher level of control in order to achieve your freedom. And when I speak of the higher level, I also mean a more demanding one than the body control.
Whoever controls the own breath controls his life energy, whoever controls the own life energy can control his mind and whoever controls his mind can become free.
Focus on breathing is not a casual nice-to-have application for yoga, but the essence on the path of spiritual liberation.
