"Yoga, in Sanskrit, can be translated as "union". It originally comes from the root word yuj, which means "to yoke", to attach yourself to a task at hand with ox-like discipline. And the task at hand in Yoga is to find union - between mind and body, between the individual and her God, between our thoughts and the source of our thoughts, between teacher and student, and even between ourselves and our sometimes hard-to-bend neighbours. In the West, we`ve mainly come to Yoga through its now-famous pretzel-like exercises for the body, but this is only Hatha Yoga, one limb of the philosophy. The ancients developed these physical stretches not for personal fitness, but to loosen up their muscles and minds in order to prepare them for meditation. It is difficult to sit in stillness for many hours, after all, if your hip is aching, keeping you from contemplating your intrinsic divinity because you are too busy contemplating “Wow, my hips really aches”.

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Yoga is the effort of experience one`s divinity personally and than to hold on to that experience forever. Yoga is about self-mastery and the dedicated effort to haul your attention away from your endless brooding over the past and your non stop worrying about the future so that you can seek, instead, a place of eternal presence from which you may regard yourself and your surroundings with poise.

Only from that point of even-mindedness will the true nature of the world (and yourself) be revealed to you."