What is yoga?

It all boils down to our relationships.

Question: What is yoga?
 
Sharon Gannon: If we want to be happy, then we have to delve deeper into the very causes of happiness. And as we are delving into those causes, we discover how we're unhappy.
When people say, "Well I want to do yoga. Could I do yoga?" I say, "No, you can't do yoga because yoga is the natural state."
What we can do are various practices which may reveal to us where we are resisting that natural state of the connectedness of all of life really is that natural state -- knowing ourselves as connected.
So we can do things which can reveal to us where we're disconnected. Like we can discover where we're unhappy in the pursuit of happiness and then attempt to get at the cause of perhaps those reasons of why we're unhappy. And we will find that it all really boils down to our relationships.
I'm not speaking of just our romantic relationships or our relationships with our husbands or wives, or girlfriends or boyfriends, or significant others. I'm talking about our relationship to life itself, to all beings, to the world itself; not just other human beings, but animal beings -- all of the various aspects of life that we share this planet with.
 
Recorded on: October 31, 2007
 

Question: What is yoga?
 
Sharon Gannon: If we want to be happy, then we have to delve deeper into the very causes of happiness. And as we are delving into those causes, we discover how we're unhappy.
When people say, "Well I want to do yoga. Could I do yoga?" I say, "No, you can't do yoga because yoga is the natural state."
What we can do are various practices which may reveal to us where we are resisting that natural state of the connectedness of all of life really is that natural state -- knowing ourselves as connected.
So we can do things which can reveal to us where we're disconnected. Like we can discover where we're unhappy in the pursuit of happiness and then attempt to get at the cause of perhaps those reasons of why we're unhappy. And we will find that it all really boils down to our relationships.
I'm not speaking of just our romantic relationships or our relationships with our husbands or wives, or girlfriends or boyfriends, or significant others. I'm talking about our relationship to life itself, to all beings, to the world itself; not just other human beings, but animal beings -- all of the various aspects of life that we share this planet with.
 
Recorded on: October 31, 2007