The Project of yoga by Gabe Hopp

The modern practice of yoga is predominantly a bodily practice. It has many great benefits, as you already know, including increased mobility, flexibility and strength, enhanced proprioception and a heightened capacity for paying attention and creating awareness. The origin of these body-focused practices goes back several hundred years to a period of yoga in which everything was a potential path for enlightenment. The yogis at the time, were willing to try “wild" things to reach the state beyond the beyond, including eating meat, drinking alcohol, ritualized sex and pretzeling their body into some questionable shapes. Out of these Tantric explorations, grew what we know today as “modern postural yoga” or hatha yoga. 

Despite the many boons of a physical yoga practice, the intention of yoga throughout time has actually been to know oneself. The earliest yogis left their communities in order to have the space and quiet to be able to do their svadhyaya or self study. In modernity, this is much more challenging, as we are typically householder yogis. (If you want a more full understanding of this, I wrote a blogpost about it a couple years ago, which you can find here: https://onetreeyoga.com/blog/2023/3/20/householder-yogis-by-gabe-hopp) To give you a quick rundown, householder yogis are practitioners who also have families, jobs and households to maintain. This is us! We are lucky to have the grounding power of yoga to guide us through these life challenges, but it does also make it harder to invest fully in the yoga project of self-knowledge. 

Last weekend in my one of continuing education classes, my teacher Livia Shapiro said “knowing yourself is the privilege of a lifetime.” Ah, I love this. And that’s what yogis through the millennia have thought too. In the language of classical yoga, the most essential, purest form of us is called purusha and it’s often referred to as the “Capital S Self.” One of the yoga paradigms of the Self is the koshas which are sheaths or layers that make up our human experience. Moving from gross to more subtle, there are 5 layers around the core center of purusha. Through yoga, we understand and move through these 5 sheaths in order to know our physical self, our energetic self, the lower and higher minds and our capacity for joy. At the very core of these layers is the Self. The Self is unchanging and is us in our purest essence.

So, how do we get to know us? The mat is a good place to start as it teaches us to slow down and pay attention. If you’re in good hands, your teacher will also direct your awareness to breath and the energy that you experience through practice. These more subtle experiences are ripe for developing a strong mind and body connection. Taking it further, a regular meditation practice will be incredibly eye-opening when it comes to the contents of the mind. Sitting daily provides great insight into the patterns of thought that our minds continuously return to. The patterns of our thoughts lead to our patterns of speech, actions and personality. We are habitual creatures and paying attention is a useful learned skill for getting to know us. 

Take some time to pay attention to you, the good stuff and the uncomfortable stuff. We will not always like what we find, but the lifelong project is to study the self in order to improve. Then, “the journey of yoga helps us uncover our hearts and move from a place of concealment to a place of revelation.” (Cindy Lusk in Align & Refine, p. 186)