Why Yoga?

Very simply, yoga is a set of techniques that help you to pretty much immediately locate what’s not working well in the body and in the body’s connection to the mind and emotions. By locating this, it leads us right to the door of what we most need to address and gets to work on improving whatever is wrong. Perhaps this is needing to heal a sore back, balance out diabetes or the effects of chemotherapy or a toxic diet, or to recover from a stroke or heart attack or other surgery or injuries. It could be to work with weight issues or fertility/virility issues. Most significantly, yoga will really help us to address and redress issues such as anxiety or depression. It is so comprehensive in its impact, you can’t practice it and not transform!

Generally in life, we are at any moment of every day faced with choices. In one sense there’s always only 2 choices: higher and lower or better and worse. The latter choice is, of course, the easier one where we go for the quick fix and ignore whatever prompts and cues our life has been signalling.

This is the bandaid approach. This catches up with us eventually in terms of some kind of crisis whether in the sphere of our own mental, emotional and physical health, or whether it’s externally in our relationships, work and standing in the world.

This is the tumbling- along- taking -your -chances path.

The other path is the proactive one, where we dynamically engage with both the major events and the day to day mundane minutiae in our lives.

In one scenario, there are obstructions that are progressively building in all of our available avenues while in the other we experience a subtle but deeply reassuring power that gives us substance and internal resources to draw on regardless of whatever dramas life is staging.

We steadily replace an innate and all pervading fear that whatever we have, whatever we are enjoying, will at some point be taken away from us, that sense of needing to hold onto things, with the alternate sense of riding the waves of that which you have in the way of talents, abilities, people, resources to deliver you into a world where your sense of who and what you are is continually expanding because it’s not based on concrete finite things like our looks, our partner, our nice car, job, house all of which will not continue in their current form.

The one constant in life is change and the yogic techniques are what enables you to welcome this and harness it.

Margrit Segesman, the founder of Gita Yoga put it like this:

There exists within man the power to contact the universal forces by which he is capable of doing anything that he may aspire to do or be. This tuning into the descending forces, gives man wings to ascend to unimaginable heights and to explore the fullness of his liberation.

With a positive attitude, life is limitless in its magnitude. Life is exciting; it should be a continuous adventure . Hidden deep within every human being are millions of wonderful new ideas waiting impatiently to be discovered.’

And that really is ‘why yoga?’

What is Yoga?

Humpty Dumptyism - that’s what true yoga is. Technically speaking, the root meaning of the word ‘yoga’ means to yoke, to join together. So yoga in its truest sense is any practice that puts all of Humpty Dumpty’s shattered pieces back together again and puts him back on his perch on the wall.

This means that, if it’s yoga, you will feel much better after practising it. If you find it gruelling, daunting, mechanical or boring, then the chances are you’re doing exercises rather than yoga practices. Likewise if you find yourself feeling frustrated, alienated or inadequate in a class, then that is not yoga either.

Yogic practices at their best are a series of techniques that leave you almost seamlessly feeling better without realising how you got there. ie you should be able to have the positive results of having ‘worked out’ without feeling that you have and without feeling drained or tired.

Generally what most people mean when they talk about yoga classes is just one of aspect of a path with many branches. They are talking about hatha yoga which is referring to all the physical practises.

Ashtanga, Iyengar, Bikram, Vinyasa, Gita are technically all different styles of, and approaches to, hatha yoga.

Hatha Yoga has four main cornerstones and they are: stretching, focussing, breathing and processing (alternatively called relaxing).

Today with the commodification and commercialisation of yoga, many classes will be mostly comprised of mechanistic physical movements and postures with very little of the other 3. This can feel like a familiar path for people but it is nowhere near as effective as when the other aspects are being incorporated. It may patch Humpty back together, but with highly visible cracks.

Gita Yoga is a very intentional combination of these 4 components but it also incorporates, gradually, some of the other branches of yoga: those streams involving making the best available choices (karma yoga), finding one’s deeper purpose (dharma yoga), following one’s heart (bhakti yoga), learning the spiritual teachings (gnana yoga) and most importantly of all for today’s world, learning how to develop and deploy the mind so that our intellect can become informed and guided by our intuition (raja yoga).

Even in the basic hatha classes that are the foundation of Gita yoga, these aspects will all be included or encouraged as will every student in the class!

The focus is on approaching our limits through the techniques with love, lightness and laughter & having a cup of tea with them, ie negotiating with charm to engender painless capitulation: no strain, no injury, no keeping up with anyone else but rather learning how to play the resilient instrument that your body is and thereby contribute to and enhance the

overall ‘performance’ of the orchestra, your class.

Sometimes an instrument is tricky- it takes time and patience to get it working, but the entire orchestra supports you.

Interestingly, one of the meanings for the word Gita is song!