What is yoga?

The classical texts describe yoga as timeless. How do you describe that timelessness in the abundance of forms, styles and disciplines now flourishing in our little yoga universe? Is my style better than someone else's? Is it time to switch? How can I know what is best? Why am I not getting better, and how do I make the best possible progress?

These questions easily confuse anyone trying yoga. Looking around, you meet paradoxes and contradictions, intrigues and disappointments, aches and pains over practices, teachers and styles that perhaps do not always live up to expectations.

Remember that yoga is a form meant to help us better understand the form of our own mind: how it works, how it is put together and what supports the mind at its base. When you succeed (say the classical texts), you pass into the formless.

So try to meet your own mind in the kind of yoga you practise. Does it give a good frame for better understanding, handling and balancing this restless mind of ours? Can I see my own restlessness and how I am driven by expectations and fleeting results? Then it becomes a little easier to land the actual experience of yoga.

Yoga is about finding stability and clarity. When we manage that, we come closer to yoga. At times life is terribly challenging and difficult, but since yoga is timeless and simply is, when we come closer to this sharp clarity in everyday life we hit the mark, and it becomes a little easier to rest in yoga.

To finally get there, it helps to better understand everything fleeting and restless in the mind that disturbs us: that most of the time we are actually not in a state of yoga, but when we do come closer, we notice a joy and inner clarity that refines and lifts us. That experience is important to look after, protect and develop. The more we hold it, the easier it becomes to approach this inner formless and timeless thing that is yoga, which frees us from suffering and pain, helps us find drive in everyday life and gives us a clear experience of life.

That is yoga in short: finding clarity, joy and harmony in everyday life despite all life's challenges. The different forms of yoga we practise must lead us to clarity and insight into our own minds. Then yoga becomes the clear light it is, waking insight and understanding in our own lives.

Best wishes for a good yoga practice from all of us in the Nøsen team.

Photo: Nicki Twang.