What Is Yoga? The True Definition Of Yoga | Anvita Dixit

Transcript

hi my name is anvita Big Shell and I'm gonna be talking about the true definition of yoga now having lived and grown up at a yoga institution in Mumbai called Cavalli Tom I had access to the spiritual teachings of yoga at a very early age and I understood that the popular notions of yoga that are fed to us to the media are not actually defining what yoga is now if we take yoga as a spiritual process and really break it up it's just teaching us that we need to use our mind body and our spirit to ascend to a higher purpose in life and if we see yoga from that perspective it's genuinely a process of self-development and growth so on this 5th international day of yoga I think it's extremely important not only to celebrate yoga as a practice but to really understand what yoga is and what its true definition and purposes as defined in the ancient Indian textbook so Yoga truly is an inseparable part of Indian ancient civilization so even thousands of years ago yoga culture existed in the mohenjo-daro and Harappa civilization on the banks of the river Sindhu so as a result all the people that lived in that area were used to live in yoga as a lifestyle so even if you look at the historic field of the Harappan civilization you will see people sitting in meditative postures and living the process and practice of yoga so as a result all of the information on yoga has actually written in these Vedic text books that come from the Harappan civilization now the issue is that all of these text books are actually written in Sanskrit which is a language that's 0.0001 98% of the Indian population speaks today so you can imagine that very few people actually know what is written in those text books because very few people actually speak that language now as a result of that what is being fed to us by the popular media or mainstream media channels is a very watered-down version of yoga and because of that what we need to be able to do is we understand the ancient yogic texts that explain yoga in some before it really able to do that we'll be able to tap into the source of yogic knowledge and understand it from its root essence to be able to then move forward on our yogic journey and spiritual path so the word yoga itself is derived from the sanskrit root word huger now huge actually has about thirty two meanings but we're gonna take only three to understand the essence of the word yoga so the three key terms are that Yoga means to join to use or to concentrate upon and now if we take this basic definition and focus on the world yoga we start to understand that ancient Yogi's define yoga as two basic concepts yoga is a process also known as patottie or yoga as a state also known as pity now if you start to understand yoga as these two things a process and a state you realize that when you go through the Arsenal's and the plan I am and you're doing the different practical aspects of yoga you're going through its process and then once you finish that or you start to move towards the higher realms of yoga you reach meditation and the process of Samadhi which is when you enter a state of yoga so as a result you need to start an asana yoga's both the process as well as a state and when we start doing that we take yoga way outside the four compartments of an asana hole because truly Yoga is a lifestyle not just something that you do for an hour and then forget about it needs to exist in every single thing that you're doing in your life and that can only happen when you start seeing yoga as a process as well as a state now because the process of self-development on the path of yoga requires such a large amount of dedication and patience the ancient Indian sages actually listed or mapped out a way in which humans can attain this process of yoke and one prominent sage was sage Patanjali we listed eight definite steps or ways and way you can actually ascend onto the process of yoke and this is how he defined those eight different steps the first one is called Yama's which are five distinct principles that define how you can be socially disciplined and then he moved on to the NIA Mars which are again five distinct principles that explain how you can be self-disciplined so he believed that those two are the prerequisites to start practicing the process of yoke and then the third one that he described was the asana or the postures now a lot of us place emphasis on the asanas and think that the physical postures are the only thing that yoga has made up of but we can't be more mistaken because as you realize in these eight different steps of yoga asana is just the third one so if asana is just one rung and also quite a lower one then what is it that these ancient Yogi's were actually speaking about that we can start ascending to so once you get over the third limber the third rung which is asana you start moving into pranaya or the understanding of the pranic functions of your body and then you knew from crown iron into pratyahara which is the fifth limb that explains that you need to withdraw your senses to actually begin entering the inner world and ascending on the spiritual path so those are the five and then you move on to the sixth one which is called Hara now now the hall now is known as a sense of concentration but the hard eyes are one pointed focus it's just some focus in like a few short bursts but it's not one pointed focus and then you move on to be on which is also known as meditation and that is when you're so single pointedly focused where you almost become the object that you're focusing on or you understand it in its entirety and then you come to the eighth one which is Samadhi now some are they literally it's comprised with two sanskrit words some and avi some literally means same and Adi means a state of being so some Adi means the same state of being so if you translate that entirely when you reach a state of Samadhi is when you're in a complete eight of you and now you have become one or completely integrated with the object of your meditation so now you realize that actually yoga has so many different limbs and processes that you can attend to and that asana is just preparing you on these higher to reach the higher limbs of yoga so the reason that we actually do Arsenal is to prepare our body to meditate for longer because the more you do Arsenal in the more agile and flexible your body becomes the longer you'll be able to sit in a meditative posture and start to feel at one or integrated with your object of meditation so that is truly the way in which you can self develop and those are the eight specific steps in which you can ascend to the path of yoga so those are the eight specific steps on the path of yoga and they truly explain how you can start to ascend on the path of self development now you must have realized that this is just the most basic or the foundational knowledge of yoga there's a much larger repository of information than yoga actually has and all of it is mostly ancient Sanskrit text books so the endeavor this channel is really to unearth all of that knowledge that is placed in those ancient yogic text books and decipher how we can use that knowledge in today's day and age so as you can understand this information is truly just the foundation of the larger yogic literature and our endeavor is really to tap into that yogic literature and help you understand how you can apply this information to your daily life so if you feel like this videos helped you and you feel like you'd like to understand how to unlock your own potential through ancient yogic literature and theory then please do to this channel and leave any questions and comments that you have in the comment section below and if you'd like to reach out to me further with any other questions that you have you can find me on instagram at and vita dot picture and i look forward to hearing from you thank you for watching this video we look forward to seeing you in the next 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