What’s yoga? In one other article, I tried to summarize the completely different elements of yoga. However I said the caveat that yoga shouldn’t be really easy to outline. As a 5,000-year-old observe, there are a complete lot of opinions about what yoga is, which tells me that defining yoga is each private and common. That’s what makes it such a dynamic observe. Many historical texts try to outline yoga. Within the West, the very best recognized of those embody: the Upanishads, The Bhagavad Gita and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Most Western yoga practitioners look to the Yoga Sutras to reply the what’s yoga query.

What Are the Yoga Sutras?

The Yoga Sutras are a compilation of concepts about yoga that had fashioned over centuries. They had been probably compiled someplace between 500 BCE and 400 CE. Nobody is aware of something concerning the purported creator, Patanjali, besides that he’s usually referred to as a sage.

The phrase sutra means “thread.” Every of the 196 sutras—that are brief aphorisms—is a thread within the bigger tapestry of yoga. The textual content contains 4 elements. I’ll use Alistair Shearer’s translation of the sutra sections right here, just because it was the core textual content of my sutra research:

1. The Settled Thoughts: An outline of what yoga is
2. Treading the Path: The “how-to” a part of the textual content
3. Growth: An outline of the powers of a concentrated thoughts
4. Enlightenment: Qualities of awakening

How Do the Yoga Sutras Outline Yoga?

Sutra 1.2 (the second aphorism within the textual content) gives the definition of yoga. All the remainder of the sutras flesh out this definition. Listed here are a couple of translations:

These are simply 5 of the dozen sutra translations I used when my research associate and I spent seven years exploring the sutras. (That is to say that this brief article solely barely factors to the sutras’ definition of yoga!)

As you possibly can see, there are many completely different interpretations. It’s because the sutras had been written with none type of non secular coloration. Due to this, every translation displays the translator’s interpretation. That’s why it’s necessary to review greater than only one translation. In my research, I additionally learn translations by Georg Feuerstein, B.Ok.S. Iyengar and Chip Hartranft, to call a couple of.

The Settling of the Thoughts

My favourite general translation is Alistair Shearer’s, together with and particularly his translation of sutra 1.2. Whereas Shearer’s translation of the sutras shouldn’t be as literal as some, I really feel that it expresses the essence of the sutras.

“Yoga is the settling of the thoughts into silence” speaks to a means of gradual awakening. The phrase “settling” is dynamic fairly than static. I see the trail of yoga as an ongoing course of, at all times altering and evolving, and settling into what’s true. It’s not a static objective that you just sometime attain after which all the pieces stops. It’s a gradual, however dynamic, course of.

What’s the silence this sutra factors to? It’s a silence that’s not depending on an absence of enter from our senses. It’s a huge, limitless consciousness that’s undisturbed by seeing, listening to, tasting, smelling, feeling and pondering. A typical metaphor for the silence of yoga is the sky. Whereas all types of climate occasions—wind, rain, snow, tropical storms, tornadoes, and so forth.—might happen throughout the context of the sky, the sky by no means loses its integrity, its sky-like nature.

Learning the Sutras

I encourage you to delve into the sutras. My research associate and I every used a few dozen translations. Alistair Shearer’s translation was our baseline, and we used the others, together with the commentaries, to assist us flesh out our understanding. The sutras are divided into small segments of three to 5 aphorisms. We spent a month finding out one in every of these sections on our personal, after which met to debate what we’d found. It took us about seven years, and by the top of it, we agreed that we may simply begin over once more!

About Charlotte Bell

Charlotte Bell found yoga in 1982 and started educating in 1986. Charlotte is the creator of Aware Yoga, Aware Life: A Information for On a regular basis Apply and Yoga for Meditators, each printed by Rodmell Press. Her third e-book is titled Hip-Wholesome Asana: The Yoga Practitioner’s Information to Defending the Hips and Avoiding SI Joint Ache (Shambhala Publications). She writes a month-to-month column for CATALYST Journal and serves as editor for Yoga U On-line. Charlotte is a founding board member for GreenTREE Yoga, a non-profit that brings yoga to underserved populations. A lifelong musician, Charlotte performs oboe and English horn within the Salt Lake Symphony and people sextet Purple Rock Rondo, whose DVD gained two Emmy awards in 2010.