From Chapter 1: The Yoga of Breathing

All life is yoga.—Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga

Yoga

The classical or literary language of India is Sanskrit. The word itself means "well or completely formed, perfected." Sanskrit is indeed a beautiful and highly evocative language. Many of its words remind me of a Russian doll, which opens up to reveal a smaller doll inside, and which in its turn opens to reveal an even smaller doll, and so on and on until the littlest doll is exposed. Even though I don't know the language well, 1 can find my way around in a Sanskrit-English dictionary. I like to look up words in the yoga lexicon and pull them apart to see what's inside. This often gives me new insights into my practice. We'll be unraveling Sanskrit words as we go through this guide. Your practice will be enriched by the hidden meanings in this perfect language.

Let's start with a word that may already be familiar to you—the Sanskrit verb yuj, which means to "yoke" or "harness." It's a relic of an age, many thousands of years ago, when Indian warriors rode into battle in chariots. These wagons typically carried an archer and his driver or charioteer and were drawn by two horses, which had the reputation of being rather ferocious. "At his deep neigh," sings one old hymn about the cry of a warhorse, "like the thunder of heaven / the foemen tremble in fear." It was the charioteer's task to hitch these barely tamed beasts to the chariot, no small feat in the days before the invention of the yoke. He needed both extraordinary bravery and skill, and as a consequence, his position was highly esteemed.

In the everyday language, yuj assumed the sense of "unite, connect, add, bring together," as well as—since the occupation of yoking or harnessing implied that the charioteer had learned a particular technique that got the chariot up and running—"make ready, prepare, set to work, employ, apply." Two notions, then, of a desired end and its means are conveyed by the verb yuj and its several derivatives, including the masculine noun yoga.

The practice of yoga is very old. There were surely contemporaries of our charioteer who were engaged in some form of yoga, though it probably didn't exactly resemble what we call yoga today. In general, yoga has four goals:

1. Regeneration or health, and the end of suffering
2. Skillful action
3. Integration or self-knowledge
4. Liberation

In much of the sacred literature of India, liberation (moksha) is explained as the yoking or joining of the embodied soul (jiva-atman) to the Great Self (parama-atman). Both yoke and join, by the way, are cognate with yuj and yoga. This is a pointed allusion to the charioteer, his horses, and the chariot. One of the most famous parables in the Upanishads recalls and plays upon this root meaning:

Know thou the soul (atman, self) as riding in a chariot,
The body as the chariot.
Know thou the intellect (buddhi) as the chariot-driver,
And the mind (manas) as the reins.

The senses (indriya), they say, are the horses;
The objects of sense, what they range over.
He who has not understanding,
Whose mind is not constantly held firm—

His senses are uncontrolled, Like the vicious horses of a chariot-driver.
He, however, who has the understanding of a chariot-driver,
A man who reins in his mind—He reaches the end of his journey,
The highest place of Vishnu.

Yoking is accomplished in a wide variety of ways, depending on which school of yoga you follow. In The Shambhala Encyclopedia of Yoga, the scholar Georg Feuerstein catalogues nearly forty different schools of yoga suitable for different personalities or temperaments. Six schools are generally considered principal: classical or raja (royal), hatha (forceful), mantra (hymn), jnana (wisdom), bhakti (devotion), and karma (selfless action). It seems fitting that a word so closely associated with the meaning of union can embrace so many disparate schools.

While this union of the embodied self and the Great Self (paramaatman or brahman) is usually the stated goal of yoga practice, it's not always the case. The most prominent exception is the classical school of Patanjali, known as Raja-Yoga. Patanjali doesn't recognize a Great Self, though he does acknowledge a deity called the Lord (Ishvara), considered a special self (purusha-vishesha) among an infinite number regular selves (purusha). Patanjali defines classical yoga as the "restriction of the fluctuations of consciousness (Yoga-Sutra 1.2)," which suggests the strenuous and risky job of harnessing itself, of bringing the skittish thoughts and rearing emotions under control.

However the supreme attainment is imagined, whether as a blissful merging with the Great Self or the quelling of the vicious horses of consciousness and nature, yogis emphasize both practice and study, especially study of sacred texts and self-study (svadhyaya, literally "going into one's own self"). Practice has two poles—an active pole that entails intense and persistent exertion (abhyasa) and a passive one that encourages what yoga tradition calls samatva, an attitude of evenness or equanimity toward the world. Yoga practice is a balancing act between doing and not-doing: we must somehow exhibit all the prowess of the charioteer in mastering his horses and yet remain the same whether in success or failure.