Yoga
Yoga (योग) — From the root yuj — "to yoke, to join, to discipline." Yoga means union: the dissolution of the felt separation between individual self and universal reality. The word covers an enormous range: Patañjali's systematic eight-limbed path, the Gita's four main paths (jñāna, bhakti, karma, rāja), and the body-focussed haṭha yoga that is most familiar in the modern West. In the Bhagavad Gita, Kṛṣṇa calls "evenness of mind" (samatvam) itself yoga — a definition worth sitting with before narrowing to any specific technique.
In Brief
- From the root yuj — "to yoke, to join, to discipline." Yoga means union: the dissolution of the felt separation between individual self and universal reality. The word covers an enormous range: Patañjali's systematic eight-limbed path, the Gita's four main paths (jñāna, bhakti, karma, rāja), and the body-focussed haṭha yoga that is most familiar in the modern West. In the Bhagavad Gita, Kṛṣṇa calls "evenness of mind" (samatvam) itself yoga — a definition worth sitting with before narrowing to any specific technique.
From the root yuj — "to yoke, to join, to discipline." Yoga means union: the dissolution of the felt separation between individual self and universal reality. The word covers an enormous range: Patañjali's systematic eight-limbed path, the Gita's four main paths (jñāna, bhakti, karma, rāja), and the body-focussed haṭha yoga that is most familiar in the modern West. In the Bhagavad Gita, Kṛṣṇa calls "evenness of mind" (samatvam) itself yoga — a definition worth sitting with before narrowing to any specific technique.