In the early 1990s, I discovered yoga
I was in the public library in Indianapolis Indiana, and it was a esoteric tome, describing a system for controlling your mind and body to become more godlike. The word yoga literally means ‘yoke’, as in the part of the chariot that attaches to the horse. Modern yoga practitioners have never seen a chariot and Sanskrit is a language of metaphor and symbols where the same word means lots of things based on the context, so it’s easier to say yoga means union or joining the body to mind. That is not how I would interpret it.
Yoga got it’s name because there’s an ancient metaphor: the horse is the emotions or mind the chariot is the physical form, and the rider is the Spark of God. The purpose of this metaphor is to illustrate that you can easily be Carried off by thoughts or feelings, and the body will always follow, but if you have the right equipment you can control your thoughts and your body and, like a chariot rider dominates the battlefield, you can dominate your future.
Some Indian or Aryan mystics discovered these practices that allow the highest part of yourself to connect with, and control your body and mind. At the time, all of the best and most powerful nobles and warriors were chariot riders, so the word ‘yoke’ or yoga referred to a real tangible object that was vital to gaining and keeping power. That is what yoga means to me: a great piece of technology that can connect thoughts feelings and actions to create an unstoppable power.
Years later, when I saw yoga somewhere in popular culture, whether it was a yoga studio, or a thirty-something white lady in spandex on Good Morning America, I was very surprised and a little bit saddened. My early teenage self gained so much from internalizing the concept of a transitory but essential dichotomy between the spiritual and physical. Learning to have awareness of your physical and mental self is only the first half of yoga. The reality that there is a higher power, and that higher power resides within you, and that you have the capacity to put all of your thoughts and actions into service of that higher power is the main point of yoga as I learned it.
This post was created using voice-to-text AI, using trained computers to translate the sounds from my mouth into written words. - Skyler Clary