WHAT IS YOGA?

This is not a simple question, and it has no simple answer — but it’s an important and interesting one to keep investigating, especially for those of us who practice, who feel that yoga is a large part of how we live, or who have had our whole lives changed by it. However you feel connected to the word, it’s worth revisiting it again and again, so that our understanding can keep being reborn alongside us. What yoga means to us can always grow beyond where it currently stands.

Yoga comes from Sanskrit, the ancient, classical language of the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family. It is the sacred language of Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism, and the language that carried this culture from South Asia into East, Central, and Southeast Asia. The word yoga appears in the Vedic texts, dating back roughly 3,500 years, and in the Bhagavad Gita — the Lord’s Song. The way the word was used then is quite different from how we tend to use it now, which is exactly why it’s worth returning to its earliest sources. Like an asana practice, this is a lifetime’s research — a project that evolves as we ourselves evolve.

The word yoga comes from the root yuj — “to yoke,” “to unite,” “to put together.” It’s most often translated as union. But that translation leaves the real questions open for each of us to sit with: What is it we are trying to unite? What have we been separated from? Is that separation even real? And how does yoga create union?

A Practice That Begins and Ends With the Self

Yoga is, at its root, a system for knowing ourselves — so completely that the knowing eventually becomes compassion. The inner knowing grows so complete that what is outside is finally recognized as mirrored within. The one who truly knows the Self comes to know all.

We begin where we can see clearly — the body, the physical layer we call annamaya kosha — and as the practice deepens, we move into subtler layers of the self, parts of us that were unknown or forgotten, and bring them back into awareness. This return, this remembering, is the whole shape of the practice.

Yoga Doesn’t Give You Anything

Here is where I want to correct something I used to believe, and maybe something you believe too: yoga does not give us light. It does not hand us tools we didn’t already have. Yoga cannot give you anything, because there is nothing missing to give.

Advaita Vedanta — the philosophical tradition underlying so much of what yoga points toward — holds that each of us, as atman, is not separate from Brahman, the ground of all being. Tat tvam asi: you are that. Not becoming that. Already that. Full. Complete. Vast. Limitless.

There’s an old image Advaita teachers return to again and again: the sun, and a thousand buckets of water set beneath it. Each bucket holds the sun’s reflection — one still and clear, one rippling in the wind, one clouded with mud, its reflection barely visible. A thousand different reflections. But the sun itself never changes. It is not diminished by the muddy bucket, not multiplied by the clear one. It simply is what it is, indifferent to the condition of the water.

We are the buckets. What differs, moment to moment and person to person, is never the truth of what we are — only the condition of the water. This is union rightly understood: not the joining of two separate things, but the recognition that separation was never real to begin with. What union shatters is avidya — ignorance, the misperception that keeps us believing we are cut off from other lives, other beings, our own depths. Yoga, in this light, is a return to what is real. Not an acquisition. A remembering.

The Stilling of the Water

In the Yoga Sutras, written by the sage Patanjali roughly 2,000 years ago, we find the line: yogas chitta vritti nirodhah — yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind. Not the filling of the mind. The stilling of it.

When the water stills, mud that was stirred up has room to settle, and what was always visible beneath the surface — the sun’s clear reflection — becomes visible again. Patanjali names, with real precision, what stirs the water in the first place: the kleshas, the afflictions. Avidya, ignorance of our true nature. Asmita, the false identification with a small, separate ego. Raga and dvesha, attachment and aversion. Abhinivesha, the fear that clings to self-preservation. These aren’t abstractions — they take shape as trauma, as social conditioning, as the oppressive structures that tell entire groups of people they are less worthy of safety, dignity, and self-determination. That water doesn’t get muddy by accident. For many of us, it was stirred deliberately, by systems built to keep the reflection obscured.

None of this touches the sun. But it determines whether we can feel it, live from it, trust it.

So when we practice — a long-held yin yoga shape that lets an old holding pattern finally release, a breath practice that interrupts an inherited nervous-system vigilance, a teaching space honest about how colonization and caste and patriarchy have shaped what “yoga” has come to mean — none of this is addition. It is subtraction. The slow, patient clearing of what was never us, so that what was always us can be felt again.

This is why the practice can never be separated from justice. If the kleshas include the ways oppression teaches people to distrust their own worth, then clearing those structures — in a yoga studio, in a body, in a society — isn’t adjacent to the spiritual work. It is the spiritual work.

Honoring Where This Comes From

However yoga speaks to you, stay curious about it. As students, it matters that we remember where it came from, and that we hold its traditions with respect — that we recognize the Hindu roots of yoga, that we remember it comes from India. Remembering this is part of what draws us closer to its mystery, its power, its light.

You were never incomplete. You are not becoming whole. You are the sun, and you always were — the practice is simply learning, patiently, how to let the water still enough to see it.

Join me in my upcoming retreat, and let’s dive deeper into the Self together — a return to stillness, a return to the Now.

Namaste,

Erika