It’s been said, “Your body doesn’t bring you to yoga. Yoga brings you to your body.”
In the same way, yoga brings us to our minds (thoughts) and hearts (emotions), so that we can create the healthiest, most satisfying, interesting, easy, and open life possible. It's not about the stretching poses only, though that's one highly beneficial part.
Yoga is Wisdom. It's the wisdom that's always with us, when we are quiet enough to recognize it. And yoga is the practice of conducting ourselves wisely: with kindness, courage, calm, quiet, and curiosity.
If those attributes appeal to us, we can thank Wisdom (aka Yoga). Wisdom/yoga is a GPS that guides us to our dreams and how we wish to live our lives. It helps us realize that one of our dreams is freedom, and that freedom is attainable through kindness, courage, calm, quiet, and curiosity. It inspires us to be easy, authentic, comfortable, and free of the bonds of our own making. It inspires us to Be.
Wisdom/yoga is the counterbalance of fear. It's fear that makes us unkind, weak, worried, rigid, resistant, and stuck.
By practicing the traits we wish to exhibit, we practice our dreams. For example, when we practice being quiet because we wish to be comfortable being quiet, it’s the first step to recognizing and acting on our other inspirations.
It isn’t always easy to be kind, courageous, calm, quiet, and curious. So we practice making different choices and discover different outcomes. For example, when we disagree with someone and choose kindness over righteousness, we feel satisfied by overcoming our own lowest impulses (regardless of the outcome). When we're scared to take a small risk, such as to ask someone for clarification of what they meant but we do it anyway, we practice courage and feel satisfied (regardless of the outcome).
Significantly, through practice, we learn just as much when we can't make different choices. We get to watch and learn when, how, and why we're stuck in our ways, and make discoveries then, too. We learn the obstacles that hinder us and resolve them in the process.
When we practice choosing wisely, as best we can, we become the Supreme Being of our lives: functioning on earth as the very wisest version of ourselves.
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