Yoga as a spiritual practice

Did you know that Yoga is actually an exercise for the mind as well as a spiritual practice? Even more than it is meant to be a purely physical practice?

 

Nowadays we get all kinds of beautiful pictures on the social media channels of fit men and women standing in a (complicated) yoga pose in the most beautiful places in the world.

As a result, it may seem that yoga is a purely physical practice. And of course it is true that through yoga you can become more flexible, fitter and more powerful.

 

But did you know that Yoga is over 5000 years old? That the rishis (as the early yogis were also called) were preoccupied with wisdom that they "got through".

 

Confronted with a world full of suffering in an endless range of depth and intensity, caused by incomprehensible things such as aging, disease and death, they went in search of answers systematically and methodically.

Nobody knows anymore who the real rishis were, but their findings could only be passed down orally from generation to generation before the invention of writing, until they were finally reflected in, among other things, the Bhagavad Gita   and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.

 

So in the past, yoga was much more aimed at ending suffering and seeking answers to life's big questions. And it was mainly a spiritual practice.