What is Yoga?

Many people who practice the Yogic Diet want to know what yoga really means. I've listed a few different ways of understanding yoga.

One definition from the Bhagavad-Gita is that yoga is the dissolution of our union with pain. Dissolution means: disintegration, termination, disrupting, breaking down. So the practices of yoga can work to end our union with physical, psychological, emotional, and/or spiritual pain.

Yoga means union. It comes from the Sanskrit word yug which means yoke. Yoga helps to yoke or connect the individual consciousness to the universal consciousness, or Source. However, yoga is not a religion. Instead it offers techniques (like the Yogic Diet) such as proper diet, exercise, relaxation, steady breathing, positive thinking, meditation, selfless service and so on that can take one more deeply into his or her own religion or spiritual path. Yoga is suitable for people of all faiths and for the secular as well.

Our true nature, our inner self, is like the sun – it is luminous, radiant, cheerful, bright, and full of happiness. Our minds are like the clouds that sometimes blocks the sun. We tend to focus on the clouds and forget that we are truly the sun. Sydney Solis of Storytime Yoga says, “The discipline of yoga can help us move the clouds out of the way, so we can again identify with the radiant self and all its possibilities.”