Reasons for Practising Yoga

by Swami Satyananda

Your reason for wanting to practice yoga or your reason for currently practising yoga is not important. The important thing is that you have overcome previous prejudices and postponements to try yoga for yourself. You have overcome the biggest obstacle.

Perhaps you are doing yoga to develop a healthy body or a beautiful body. There is nothing wrong with this motive and the practice of yoga will help you to attain this. All we say to you is “Be aware of your mind. Do you feel more peaceful? Have you developed greater concentration?” If so, then through personal experience you will know that yoga practices have a beneficial influence on the mind as well as the body.

Perhaps you have some illness or body ailment you want to eliminate and have come to yoga as a last resort. Whether it is physical or mental, it does not matter, for yoga can help you. If it is mental peace you want or improved concentration or willpower, then definitely yoga can help, as the very essence of yoga is tied up with these faculties.

Many people have unsatisfactory relationships with wife or husband, friends or colleagues. The practice of yoga will help put your relationships on a sure positive basis. Remember, a relationship improves in depth of understanding according to the level of self-awareness. Yoga aims at enabling you to know yourself and to see your foibles and nature in others. In this way understanding arises and through this your personal relationships will improve.

Perhaps you have heard that yoga can improve your sexual relationships. Yes, this is true and is a perfectly good reason for practising yoga, especially since inadequate sexual relationships are often the cause of much unhappiness and frustration. A body that is perfectly healthy and efficient and a mind that is tuned to a high point of sensitivity and calmness, as they are through yoga practices, increase one’s ability to enjoy sexual union or remove the obstacles that at present make it impossible.

Maybe you have religious beliefs, but without any spiritual experience. Or maybe you have no religious beliefs and you seek spiritual experience. Or perhaps you have no belief in the existence of spiritual experience, but have come to yoga, merely to see what it is all about. It does not matter- you have come. That is the main thing.

What we are trying to say is that whenever your situation in life, whatever you believe or do not believe, whatever you want from life, yoga will help you because it changes your whole being and hence your relationship with and attitude to life itself.

The ultimate point of yoga however is to expand your consciousness, to open your eyes to the vast number of things around you of which at present you are unaware. It was Shakespeare who said “There are more things in heaven and earth.. than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” We must keep our minds open to new possibilities. It is yoga that shows us the way.