what yoga really means to you?

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By: Ubiratan Gonzaga Silva
Bira is an author, a Yoga instructor and the creator of the Ancient School of Yoga. He spent 18 years in spiritual practices, and his life in the Himalayas brought him into contact with yogis of ...
Edited date: October 10, 2022Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

a deeper look at the School of Yoga

When you come to your Yoga mat, what is the first thing you do? Some people think about doing a difficult pose, others just want to forget their problems for a while, and others just want to feel good.

It depends on why do you practice. For a good teacher, is easy to see where the student is, even if he or she is very smart, flexible and charming. Technical knowledge and physical ability are only one side of the coin. This is why you can find many yogis and yoginis with decades of practice, whom still carry deeply rooted the same old patterns.

This is very important to notice. Yoga has many different ways, but the School of Yoga is still the same, and still has the same goals. It all goes back to the very first thought you have when you begin your practice and the very last thought you have when you end it.

There are many reasons why we decided to follow this beautiful path. Yoga is a path of ‘immortality and eternal youth’, but how exactly can we connect to the same source that yogis did many centuries ago?

It depends on how deep you want to go, or how deep you think you can go. This huge tree of knowledge and wisdom has many branches and many ways to express itself, and all this is manifested in the eyes of a yogi or yogini, and we can all see it.

The teachings of Yoga are very simple. So simple that we take them for granted and complicate them.

The ancient philosophy, the values, and principles are still the same, even with so many changes in our way of living. I would say that is actually easy to learn it, to memorize Sanskrit words and repeat them, and this is where the real trick comes.

Look at your own practice and reflect on what Yoga really means to you, and the importance it has on your life. This is perhaps the only difference between the modern yogis of now and the first practitioners from old times, who developed the principles and practices we learn today.

The difference is the importance we give. Before it was very difficult to find a master and learn it. Today we don’t even need a master; we Google it, and then we think we have mastered it. 

Yoga as we see it today and the way that it is transmitted may be changing and evolving, but if you go deeper, and actually do all the time the essential Practices the School of Yoga teaches, you will see that certain things have never changed, and never will do.

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