What is Yoga Anyway?
Just as Importantly, What Yoga Isn’t

Yoga is a way to experience the world and choose how to live in it.

Yoga isn’t a religion or a cult. There’s no yoga authority over you, it’s just you and the yoga.

Yoga is a union of complements (i.e., masculine/feminine, strength/flexibility), which creates a mutually enlivening relationship between them.

Yoga isn’t concerned with domination or superiority, though it does inspire excellence.

Yoga helps you shift your perspective appropriately, so that everything that can be perceived by you is revealed.

Yoga isn’t just a bunch of poses for people who can make their bodies into pretzel-shapes.

Yoga is therapeutic, physically, psychologically and emotionally, though yoga isn’t a quick fix for a lifetime of habitual misalignments within the body or the mind.
Yoga takes time to work.

Yoga isn’t torturous or painful, though it may be uncomfortable. Breathing into the discomfort may make it go away.

Pain is unacceptable, since it’s your body’s way of warning you that you’re hurting yourself. Only you can tell the difference between your discomfort and your pain. Don’t let anyone tell you what you’re feeling.

Yoga is an awareness practice that can help you experience and identify your feelings for yourself.

Yoga is transformative, but it isn’t going to change anyone who truly doesn’t want to change.

Yoga isn’t an accident or some arbitrary set of postures.

Yoga is a conscious interplay between people and their own nature.
Yoga respects and honors both differences and similarities.
Yoga doesn’t claim to be the only way to live your life, or even the best way, and it does not conflict with any genuine spiritual path. Yoga can deepen and enrich your own beliefs.

Some people just don’t like yoga. Perhaps never… or at least not for now. But a few years from now, who knows? Yoga will still be here. Even if it’s all lost someday, it will bubble back into being eventually because yoga is timeless, and for all times.