After months of waiting, the Yoga Works teacher training I’m signed up for finally starts tomorrow! I’m really excited, and can’t wait to get started. It’s a one-month intensive training, and hopefully I’ll have time to provide some updates here along the way.

Being an intensive course we actually have an assignment due on the first day of class. We need to answer the question “what is yoga?,” which I think is a poorly camouflaged attempt at assessing our knowledge level. Which is good, how would they otherwise know what we need to learn? I have thought about it for a few days, and I couldn’t come up with a simple definition of yoga. I could think of many part answers that described some aspect of yoga, so eventually that’s how I approached the question. Here is my assignment:

What is Yoga?

My first thought in response to this question was “well, you know it when you see it.” The sadhu covered in ashes, sitting in lotus pose in a cave in India is doing yoga. The mom working on her downward-facing dog following instructions on a DVD at home is also doing yoga. So are gym goers sweating through sun salutations. Yoga seems to have the powers of a chameleon, changing and adapting to its surroundings and practitioners. But what is it? Depending on whom you ask you might get a variety of answers:

Yoga is…

1. the path to enlightenment
2. an ancient philosophical system originating in India
3. a spiritual practice that aims to experience oneness with the universe
4. a way to prepare your body for meditation
5. a method to unite the body, mind and spirit
6. a technique to gather the strands of the mind
7. physical postures and breath exercises to calm the mind and create a healthy body
8. de-stressing stretching exercises
9. practicing compassion and serving our fellow beings
10. something that crazy old guy with the blocks and metal chair does

It’s open for discussion which of these are more authentic definitions of yoga, but I think it’s safe to deduce that yoga is a practice that works to unify the mind and the body, with a focus on being present in the moment and being aware of an interconnectedness between all things.

When I meet someone completely new to yoga I usually choose some version of answer seven–”yoga is the practice of physical postures and breath exercises to calm the mind and create a healthy body.” Once you have practiced yoga for a while you start craving more in-depth answers, and the more you learn the more you see how much you don’t know. When I first started doing yoga I used to take a class at my gym, and other than a few oms and an introduction to ujjayi pranayama the class focused mainly on asanas. I was happy with this class for a long time, settling into a happy comfort zone. Then I moved to a different part of the city and started going to a local yoga studio. A whole new world opened up to me, and I felt like I had been practicing in a small room, not knowing there was an entire house to explore!

The discipline of yoga is vast and diverse, which explains why it is so hard to define what it is. I think it’s easy to create a too narrow definition of yoga depending on what you have seen or experienced. It’s like in the famous poem The Blindmen and the Elephant by John Godfrey Saxe, where six blind men argue about what an elephant is after having touched only a small part of the elephant. So it is when we try to describe yoga – yoga is the trunk, or ear, or leg that you have touched, but it is only when you add all the parts together you get the whole picture.