It’s All Yoga to Me

We welcomed a new cohort of yoga teacher trainees to Ocala Yoga Center the other weekend, and with it came one of my favorite opportunities: exploring the philosophy behind the practice.

Naturally, that means spending some time with Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras, and particularly his famous definition of yoga:

Yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ.

“Yoga is the stilling of the modifications of the mind.”

It’s probably the most quoted statement in all of yoga philosophy. But I’ve always found something curious about it: for such a famous definition, it doesn’t seem to do a very good job of defining what we usually call yoga.

Most of us think of yoga as something we practice. And that seems perfectly natural, because it’s how we approach most activities we’re trying to get better at.

Think about what it means to practice something.

When I go to dance practice, I dance. When I practice piano, I play the piano. When I practice tennis, I play tennis. Or at least, that’s how we tend to think about it.

When we go to yoga practice, we think of it as doing yoga. We perform postures, regulate our breathing, and meditate—and that, we think, IS yoga.

But here’s the problem: by Patañjali’s definition, none of those activities, by themselves, constitutes yoga in the sense he’s defining.

So what’s going on?

To see the problem more clearly, consider another familiar word: concentration.

We can practice concentration, performing exercises designed to strengthen our attention. We can achieve concentration, entering a state of sustained focus. And we can use concentration to accomplish something else, like solving a difficult problem.

Now suppose someone defined concentration as “a state of sustained, focused attention.”

That’s a perfectly good definition of concentration as a state. But it’s not a definition of the exercises we perform to develop it, much less the entire discipline devoted to cultivating and applying it.

And that’s exactly what’s happening with yoga.

When we ordinarily speak of yoga, we might mean the activities we perform in class, or the entire philosophical and practical system to which those activities belong.

But when Patañjali defines yoga in the second verse of his Yoga Sūtras, he’s using the word in a narrower sense, one that’s largely disappeared from everyday usage: to name the particular state those practices are intended to produce.

We practice yoga (the techniques we do in class) to achieve yoga (the state Patañjali describes), in pursuit of the ultimate aim of yoga (the entire system): liberation.

It sounds almost comically repetitive. But that’s precisely the point. One word is doing several different jobs, and confusing those meanings makes Patañjali’s famous definition seem far less sensible than it actually is.

And that distinction matters when we step onto the mat.

We’re certainly developing skills when we practice postures, breathing techniques, and meditation. But we’re not simply trying to become better at performing those activities. We’re cultivating the capacity for a different kind of experience, one that Patañjali teaches can ultimately transform our understanding of who we are.

The practices are what we do. The state of yoga is what we’re learning to achieve. And liberation is why we’re doing any of it in the first place.