What is Yoga? The meaning of life.

As I come to the end of my yoga teacher training the final exam asks, “What is yoga? What does it mean to you?” I found this question far more interesting than expected. There’s the canned answer that yoga in Sanskrit means “yoke” or “union.” However, most people in the modern world are familiar with yoga and this answer has nothing to do with their idea of what yoga is. On the flipside, as a practitioner, I also have ideas about what yoga is and the canned answer feels flippant.

My short answer, as a Christian, is that yoga is one of the best paths I’ve found to answer the meaning of life. All humans, obviously, struggle with this question at some point. One primary belief I’ve developed about the meaning of life is that all people should be aiming to age with optimal health and that that pursuit brings meaning. The medical industry defines health as “the absence of disease” but that definition of health is lacking and will bring no satisfaction. I doubt any of us feel healthy simply because we don’t have a disease. Though I’m not a CrossFitter, I like their definition of health, that it is a balance of optimizing five characteristics. Namely, the way we Eat, Sleep, Train, Think, and Connect define our health. My argument in this article is that yoga is a path to the meaning of life as it helps us actively work toward all of those simultaneously.

When most people think of yoga, their mind has a picture of contortionist-like postures and skinny, hyper-flexible humans, mostly ladies. So most people see yoga as a training program, and that’s one part of it, the practice of poses is asana. Asana is a system of training like weight lifting or cross training. When considering the way we train in yoga or rather, applying yoga to that one aspect of health, it’s very unique. In any training program, I consider the ten components of fitness: cardio health, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, speed, coordination, agility, balance, and accuracy. Asana does many of these exceptionally well, especially if body weight is what a person expects to need to move. For example, I’ve never experienced a workout that pushes the range of motion of every joint like yoga does. I would also be surprised if someone could find a workout that safely trains balance and specific types of coordination as well as yoga. This is to say that yoga is unique and that, for a healthy lifestyle, everyone should do yoga. However, I’ll gladly admit that yoga is not good at training some of these components of fitness. If you did only yoga for training, you would clearly be limiting your cardio health, strength, power, and speed as yoga doesn’t ask us to lift anything heavier than the body, and doesn’t include the type of motion necessary to train cardio very intensely, or speed at all. As a result, my rule for training is “Yoga + …” and I think you could choose just about whatever you want for the plus, but should also add weight lifting and speed work unless they’re already included. However, training is just one aspect of fitness and many (possibly most) yogis would say it’s not the main reason they practice.

So, what is the essential element of yoga? If someone was sitting quietly, breathing, many people would say this isn’t yoga but meditation. However, in the eight limbed path of yoga, only one limb, asana, deals with postures, while another deals exclusively with breathing, and FOUR of the limbs deal directly with meditation. I propose that the essential element of yoga is attention to breath. What I mean is that you can remove any part of a yoga practice and it’s still yoga, unless you remove attention to breath. This seems unimportant until we consider our modern lifestyle. Many of us live at least 16 hours each day in high energy situations: wake early to exercise, work 8 hours with no breaks, rush home to take care of duties and play with our phone or watch another screen until we fall into restless sleep. Then we wonder why our sleep is restless but we spend little to no time teaching our body to rest during the day. Statistically, the most healthful yoga practices are restorative, which is exclusively long held, supported, resting poses. Therefore, statistically, people need more rest in their day. Most yoga practitioners’ favorite pose is Savasana, dead man’s pose, and this is because it’s the most common restorative pose. All of this is to say, exercising will help you sleep but we also need to train our bodies to rest, and yoga does that directly, if you choose the right yoga. (If you’re interested then check out restorative yoga and yoga nidra.) And the core reason that yoga works this way is attention to the breath. Through attention to breath, and yoga posture sequences, we can achieve better training and sleep, but that’s only two of five aspects of health.

One common belief is that the most important piece of health is what we eat. “You are what you eat.” “Garbage in, garbage out.” This is a fair thought in that, if you don’t take care for what you eat, then the rest of your health choices probably don’t matter. If you eat McDonalds three times each day, then you can exercise all you want and you will probably still be massively overweight and will not sleep well. Yoga has parameters on food that some practitioners follow and others don’t but I would argue that, if you practice daily, you will eat better. When practicing daily, I first found that I eat less. I don’t want to practice on a full stomach, and I’m more attentive to how my stomach feels, which drives me to make better choices. Many yogis will tell you that all yogis are vegetarians because they strive to a life of ahimsa, or non-harm. So if a yogi can choose to eat something that was killed or something else, they will choose to do less harm. While I won’t tell someone how to eat, I will say that we should at least think through what we eat and consider the impact of our choices. So daily yoga practice will help us eat better by bringing our attention to our bodies and also push us to consider the impact of our choices. That, to me, is plenty of reason to say that yoga makes me a more healthful eater, exerciser, and sleeper.

Patterns of thought are fascinating and difficult to change. According to the National Science Foundation, about 80% of our thoughts are negative and 95% are the same thoughts from day to day. We are creatures of habit and we have trained ourselves to live the same emotional ruts each day, while simultaneously wondering why we aren’t happy. We want everyone to love us but we treat ourselves like enemies. Personally, I know of very few ways to change patterns of thought. New learning is helpful, but hard to sustain every day. The only practice I’ve found that sustainable allows me to impact my thought patterns every day is meditation. I’m not getting esoteric, rather what I mean by meditation is sustained attention on breath, heart beat, other autonomous systems, and eventually no attention at all. This means that as we take control of our attention in meditation, we are able to observe our thoughts for what they are and see the way we treat ourselves and the world. The famous American cartoon GI Joe taught me that, “knowing is half the battle,” so this is half the battle to changing our thought patterns. How much better would you be if you supported your own happiness? How much more successful would you be if you actively made choices that help you? The first things I learned in yoga were that I can actually be comfortable in my body and that breathing is entertainment. I came into the practice as an athlete who was very capable of many things but not sitting on the ground with ease or tying my shoes without sitting down. Yoga taught me to be able to sit still, breathe, and be content. I used to say yoga taught me about Jesus, but now I believe Jesus led me to yoga. Meditation and prayer are generally very similar but my prayer practice used to take place in fits and jumps for 5 or 10 minutes at a time, and an occasional prayer meeting. Now my meditation practice can go for hours. Sometimes I do pray. Other times I listen to the Holy Spirit. Still other times I feel my consciousness disappears completely. Afterwards, I’m able to carry these intentions through my day. This means meditation has given me the opportunity to change my thought habits, always for the better. Is it a gift from the Holy Spirit or an effect of meditation practice? I honestly don’t care. All in all, I’ve never found anything so powerful. If you don’t pray for hours and you don’t have a meditation practice then you’re missing out! Likely, you’re half the person you could be and I pray that I can convince you to give it a solid try. It continues to change my life literally every day, and that means the pursuit of yoga leads to agency over thought patterns.

How can we positively impact our relationships with other people? Only by working on ourselves. We have no agency in others’ actions, only the way we react. Before yoga, I was a great person that would live reactively. Meditation teaches mindfulness, which is really like a 10% meditation that you carry through the day. Through mindfulness, I’ve gained some agency over my reactions. Viktor Frankel concluded, “Between stimulus and response there’s a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” When we experience self love in our meditations and begin to move our emotional ruts to respond in that direction as well, it gives us the agency to treat others with love. Yoga teaches that we can’t give what we don’t have. You want love? Learn to love yourself. Self love is a near enemy of pride in all of its sinful formations: arrogance, narcissism, anger, … I sin less and less as a result of meeting the Holy Spirit in meditation and prayer. What’s better is that the idea isn’t to not sin, it’s to learn to love myself like Christ does, which drives me to love others the same way!

One of the foundational meanings of life is to pursue health in all of its aspects of eating, sleeping, and training well, on top of producing loving thought patterns, and connecting better to other people and the divine.

That is to say, I haven’t found a practice that works toward holistic health like the daily practice of yoga. Christ saves us but fixating on the scripture, traditions, and institutions over the person of Christ has moved the church away from the gospel. Growing up in the church, I am insanely blessed to have met Jesus young but, as I grew, I found it more and more difficult to buy into a church. One church has a wonderful teacher with an occasionally bigoted message. Another has great leadership but their love of positive messages allow mistreatment in the homes of disconnected members. I wouldn’t say the church has lost its way but I think the institution of the church sure has and I couldn