Welcome to Yoga with Nadia

The Yoga Sutras are a practical textbook to guide your spiritual journey of remembering who you really are. Here are some important takeaways that every Yogi should know.

The true meaning of Yoga is the union of body, mind, soul, and spirit. According to Yoga, we suffer because of the illusion of separation between our individual consciousness from Universal Consciousness or Brahman. The Yoga Sutras are a practical to guide your spiritual journey of remembering that union.

The Yoga Sutras were composed by a man named Patanjali. There is not much known about him, except that he was presumably Indian and lived somewhere between the second and fourth century BC. Patanjali is also credited with writing the Mahabhasya, a treatise of Sanskrit grammar and a commentary on Charaka Samhita, the basic text of Ayurveda. Whether they are the same or different people remains a scholastic argument.

Mythologically, Vishnu the maintainer of the Universe, sleeps between creations, resting on the great multi-headed serpent Anantha, floating on the Ocean of Consciousness. When Shiva Nataraj woke Vishnu with his dance of creation, Anantha asked to be born as a great teacher. Shiva granted his wish and he was born as Patanjali in the palm of the great Yogini, Gonika.

The Yoga Sutras contain 196 Sutras, divided between four chapters, discussing the aims and practice of yoga, the development of yogic powers and finally, liberation. Like a gentle guiding hand, the Yoga Sutras warn you of the pitfalls on your spiritual journey and offer the means to overcome them. While there is a teaching in each Sutra, we’ll look at a few here and leave the remainder for future exploration.

In Vedic texts, it is common to encapsulate the whole teaching early in the discourse. Patanjali does this in the first few sutras, giving you the essence of what’s to come:

“Yoga is the progressive settling of the mind into silence.

When the mind is settled, we are established in our own essential state, which is unbounded consciousness.

Our essential nature is usually overshadowed by the activity of the mind”

This means: Your spiritual practice should be to look within. Your true Self lies hidden in the silence between your thoughts, beyond all limitations. However, the doubts, chaos, and confusion of your thoughts cause you to forget who you really are.

The obstacle to spiritual progress is stress, which creates fatigue, leading to doubts and causing laziness, which brings sensory attachments manifesting as delusions, which causes you to forget who you are. By being committed to your practices, you can overcome all of these.

To have a peaceful mind, you should cultivate attitudes of friendliness without jealousy toward those who are joyful; have compassion toward those who are unhappy and less fortunate; delight in and support the acts of the virtuous; and be impartial to and avoid the dramas of the impure.

The fruit of wrong action is sorrow, the fruit of right action is joy. You must take responsibility for your thoughts, words, and actions by living consciously. The Yoga Sutras are a path of purification, refinement, and surrender.

The causes of your suffering are the following:

• Forgetting who you really are
• Living from the ego
• Clinging to pleasure and pain
• Fearing death

All of these are resolved through meditation when you remember your essential nature of unbounded consciousness.