GOING DEEPER
Why should you do yoga? You may have been told that yoga is about flexibility, sweat, and sculpting a sexy body. Well, that's not it.
Authentic yoga isn't about burning calories. It is about burning away the mental noise that keeps you disconnected. The postures are just ONE small part of it designed to prepare the body for deep meditation and self-realization.
There may not be a really bad yoga practice, because every physical exercise comes with plenty of benefits. But there certainly is a missed opportunity, and a right and wrong if you are seeking balance. A wrong yoga practice is every practice that makes you turn your attention outwards, feeding your ego. A right yoga practice is everything that turns your attention inwards, calms your nervous system, and balances your mind. The stillness between postures is just as important as the movement itself.
But somewhere along the way, the West has turned yoga into a workout. Studios push power flows and absurdities like hot yoga, but yoga was never meant to be about external results. It is about inner transformation. It is about mastering your mind, breath, and energy. Not just your body.
If your yoga practice leaves you feeling restless, exhausted, or stuck in self-judgement, you are missing the real gift of yoga. It isn't about perfection, it is about presence.
You don't have to travel to India to experience authentic yoga. But you do have to shift your perspective. Because real yoga doesn't care about how deep you stretch, it cares about how deep you connect. This is the ONE WHY.
In the West, you have been taught to see yoga as a personal journey: about self-care, self-improvement, and self-mastery. But in its truest form, whether you can identify with it or not is another topic, yoga is about dissolving the self entirely.
The ancient wisdom of yoga isn't designed to make you more flexible, strong, or even healed. It is meant to strip away illusions, break the grip of ego, and to lead you toward something far greater than personal identity: Union with the infinite.
It is not about how deep you go into a pose, but how deeply you can let go of attachment, control, and the constant need to be someone. It asks us to go beyond validation, beyond even our own desires, because the ultimate goal isn't personal enlightenment, but the dissolution of the separation of the 'us' and the world at large.
And the hardest truth about yoga? Yoga isn't about you. And that? That's terrifying. Because the modern world tells us to seek empowerment, to claim our identity, to build and define ourselves. But yoga asks us to let it all go.
That's why true yoga is uncomfortable. It doesn't validate the ego. It dismantles it. It strips away attachments, desires, and the need for external validation.
Ego death means stepping into the unknown, losing the identity you have spend your whole life creating. It means seeing through the illusion of control. Spirituality is not always blissful, it's raw, humbling, and sometimes painful.
That was a lot! But fear not, you don't need to go all in and become a renunciate or hermit. There is plenty of bliss to experience on the way, in fact right now, and it doesn't need years of preparation or practice. All it needs is a moment of yoga.
Set away a time for your body, mind, and spirit, to find the answers you seek. Or to stop looking. And no matter where you stand on this, feel pure joy after practice. Refreshed, balanced. A bit like being newly born.
SPIRIT: Universal, Modern, Accessible
Information about the heart inside ONEy is here.