Why We Practice
Recently I’ve found myself conducting something of an informal poll whenever I meet fellow yoga practitioners:
“What got you started on your yoga journey?”
There is no wrong answer. Some people are looking for strength and mobility. Others want to address—or stave off—chronic pain. Some want to get fit. Some want to relax. Some are looking for community and connection.
Yoga does all of these things, and they are all wonderful reasons to get on the mat.
But as our practice deepens, we often discover that these benefits, valuable though they are, are actually incidental to yoga’s deeper aim. Doing yoga only for fitness is a little like taking up baking because you’re looking for a forearm workout. Yes, kneading dough all day really will build impressive forearm strength. And if that’s what you’re after, by all means, knead away! But if you never put the dough in the oven, you’re missing out on a wonderful opportunity.
The final sutra of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras describes the culmination of yoga as kaivalya, often translated as liberation.
You might reasonably wonder: Liberation? What could standing on my head—or touching my toes—possibly have to do with liberation?
It’s a fair question. To answer it, let’s begin by thinking about what yoga proposes to liberate us from.
Many people familiar with Indian thought hear the word liberation and immediately think of moksha—liberation from the cycle of rebirth. But Patanjali’s discussion is more immediate and experiential. Throughout the Yoga Sutras, liberation is presented as freedom from the five kleshas, or afflictions – ignorance, ego-identification, attachment, aversion, and fear. At first glance, that may sound like a state so extraordinary that it’s hard to imagine. But I think we’ve all experienced brief glimpses of something very much like it.
Suppose you’re playing a sport, making music, painting, or otherwise completely absorbed in a challenging project. The task demands just enough of your skill to occupy your whole attention. During these moments we sometimes enter into what psychologists call a flow state.
In such a state, our worries temporarily fade into the background. Our plans, our judgments, even our usual sense of self grow quiet. We’re simply present with what we’re doing. These moments rarely last long, and we can’t usually summon them on command. But imagine if that same quality of presence extended beyond a single activity.
Imagine taking out the trash with that same effortless attention. Driving through traffic. Sitting in a boring meeting. Imagine meeting everything life places before you with that same immediacy, curiosity, and presence.
That, I think, points us toward the kind of liberation yoga has in mind. Not an escape from the world, but a way of inhabiting it – a state in which the mind ceases to pull us away from what is happening right here and now.
So returning to the original question: how does asana practice help cultivate that?
The answer begins with another question: What breaks the flow in the first place? The problem isn’t that the mind thinks: thoughts arise almost continuously even during flow. Flow breaks when our attention compulsively follows wherever the mind leads. So what causes this compulsion?
If you begin watching carefully, you’ll notice that this usually doesn’t happen at random. Something first changes in the body. A difficult conversation tightens the throat. A mistake knots the stomach. An unexpected criticism hardens the chest. Fear, frustration, shame, excitement, anticipation—they all have a physical signature.
The mind notices those sensations and immediately begins constructing a story around them. It explains them. Judges them. Resists them. Replays them. Before we know it, our attention has left the present moment and become absorbed in the mind’s commentary.
This is where asana begins to reveal its deeper purpose.
Every posture trains us to perceive the body with greater precision. We learn to distinguish effort from strain. Stability from rigidity. Relaxation from collapse. We notice tiny shifts in breath, balance, muscular engagement, and subtle internal sensation that would once have escaped our awareness entirely.
Over months and years, we develop a richly detailed map of our inner experience. That capacity doesn’t stay on the mat. When difficult emotions arise in daily life, we start to recognize them first as changes within the body. Because we’ve spent hundreds of hours learning to notice those changes without immediately reacting to them, we’re no longer quite so easily carried away by them.
Little by little, the mind loses its habit of commandeering our attention—not because we’ve silenced it, but because we’ve become less compelled to follow wherever it leads.
Seen in this light, while asana alone does not produce liberation – it is, after all, only one limb of Patanjali’s eight limbs – neither is it merely an unrelated exercise regimen. It is training perception and attention. It is refining our capacity to remain present with experience as it unfolds.
So if you came to yoga hoping for stronger shoulders, a healthier back, relief from stress, or simply a sense of community, you came for a perfectly good reason. Those benefits are real, and they are worth celebrating.
But if you stay with the practice long enough, you may discover that every posture has been teaching something deeper all along—not merely how to move your body, but how to inhabit your life.
Jai Bhagwan,
Jesse
