What is True Yoga?
If we’ve been practicing for a while, we might begin to feel that there’s more to Yoga than what we do in the studio. That’s how it happened for me, and I can’t be the only one.
To be clear from the get-go: there is no one correct way for every person to practice Yoga. To say that Yoga is vast is an understatement. There are many paths, many teachers, many lineages, many practices, and many doorways into the deeper truth of what Yoga is getting to, so when I use the phrase true Yoga, I’m speaking about Yoga as a path of transformation and self-realization. A path that includes an individualized mix of the body, breath, mind, heart, daily life, self-study, meditation, awareness, and the deeper remembering of who we really are.
Yogāsana, the physical postures we practice in class, are powerful. Āsana teaches us to feel more embodied. Literally, we begin to feel our Selves in our bodies. We're moving with awareness, and we're breathing with intention. We start to notice the difference between forcing and listening, between performing and practicing, between moving through the body and actually inhabiting it. For many of us, āsana is the first place we begin to experience Yoga.
Still, as awesome as āsana is, the studio alone is only scratching the surface. There are deeper and subtler layers of our being that Yoga begins to touch when we keep going.
The path of Yoga
True Yoga, however you practice, is Yoga practiced as a path of expanding awareness and moving toward self-realization. Yoga helps us uncover an understanding that has always been within us, but has become buried through the experiences, conditioning, patterns, and habits of daily life.
This is the Yogic way of understanding our conditioning:
The cycle of conditioning
The Sanskrit word karma translates literally to action, and everything set into motion begins with an action.
Our karmas, our actions and the actions affecting us, leave impressions in our mind. These impressions are called saṃskāras.
As similar impressions accumulate, they reinforce vāsanās: latent tendencies, including our desires, aversions, and habitual inclinations, that shape how we perceive, feel, react, and move through the world.
Those tendencies influence our next actions (karmas), which create further saṃskāras and continue to perpetuate the cycle.
Yoga helps us become aware of this cycle as it unfolds. With awareness, we gain the possibility of responding consciously rather than automatically repeating the same patterns, over and over.
More than exercise
This is why Yoga is so much more than exercise. A dedicated practice begins to clear away some of the clouds in our perception. We start to see where we’ve been reacting from old patterns. We start to notice where the ego is trying to control, defend, compare, prove, or protect. We start to understand that the personality we’ve built is not the whole of who we are. It may have helped us survive and it may have helped us function in the world, but Yoga invites us into something deeper than the persona.
In that sense, ego is one of the great things Yoga is helping us overcome, not because the ego is evil, and not because we need to reject our humanness, but because the ego tends to make itself the centre of everything. It says, “This is who I am. This is what I need. This is what I fear. This is what I want. This is what I must protect.” Over time, Yoga teaches us that there is something within us that is deeper, quieter, wiser, and more spacious than all of that.
This is where the real practice begins. True Yoga is about discovering our true nature. It’s about remembering the part of us that is not defined by our stories, roles, fears, wounds, preferences, achievements, failures, or personality. Different traditions will talk about this in different ways, but the essential movement is the same.
“Yoga leads us inward, through the layers of who we think we are, toward the deeper reality of who we actually are.”
The importance of good teachers
How we practice Yoga is ultimately individual. This is why I believe you are your own greatest teacher. That doesn’t mean we don’t need teachers, teachings, lineages, or guidance, because we absolutely do. Good teachers can open doors we didn’t even know were there. A sincere lineage can hold wisdom that has been refined and protected for generations, even centuries and millennia. But at some point, the teachings have to become alive inside us. We have to practice, observe, reflect, discern, and listen inwardly. No one else can do that part for us.
Some teachers will tell us that we need to follow one specific lineage and stay loyal to it, and for many people, that’s a beautiful and powerful path. My own way has been a little different. I’ve found that different perspectives bring me greater clarity because, for me, the different angles illuminate the same underlying truth. The more perspectives, the more angles I’m able to see from, the more I’m able to comprehend the unified message underneath all of them.
That doesn’t mean jumping from teacher to teacher, collecting ideas, and never practicing anything deeply. It means exploring sincerely. Learn from a teacher or tradition. Practice what they teach. See how it works in your body, breath, mind, and life. Notice how it changes you. Then, if something calls you deeper or wider, or elsewhere, follow that thread with discernment. Yoga is not small. It can hold sincere devotion to one path, and it can also hold the kind of seeking that learns through many doors. You do you.
For me, after I learned everything I could from regular studio practice, the only way I knew how to go deeper was to take teacher trainings with strong lineages. First meditation teacher training, then Yoga teacher training. When those avenues had given me what they could, I went looking for teachers who weren’t only teaching people how to become teachers, but were transmitting deeper and deeper wisdom.
The massive scale of Yoga
It never fails to amaze me how deep Yoga wisdom goes. The more we learn, the more we realize how much we don’t yet understand. Yoga teaches us about the wisdom of the universe, so the learning never really ends. At the same time, Yoga teaches us about the wisdom already within each of us, because as above so below. It connects us back to the deepest part of ourselves, beneath the noise, beneath the conditioning, beneath the identity we’ve spent a lifetime building.
So Yoga is both infinite and infinitesimal. It is the biggest of big and the smallest of small. It speaks to the vastness of reality, and it also asks us to notice one breath, one thought, one reaction, one moment of awareness. It’s so profound that it’s almost impossible to put into words, and I think that’s part of why, in the West anyway, Yoga has so often been reduced to poses. The body is the easiest doorway to understand.
But the body is still a doorway. We don’t have to reject āsana to go deeper, but it can be the beginning of a fuller path. We can learn to let the breath teach us. We can let meditation steady us. We can let philosophy challenge us. We can let daily practice reveal us, and we can let Yoga become something that doesn’t only happen on the mat, but begins to shape how we live.
A profound journey
True Yoga is the most profound journey any one of us can take. We take it by seeking sincerely, practicing steadily, and becoming willing to move the ego out of the centre. Slowly, the practice helps us evolve toward a more spacious, truthful, spirit-based understanding of reality. And little by little, we begin to remember what Yoga has always been pointing us toward: the truth of who we really are.
If you’re ready for a structured way to begin exploring Yoga beyond the poses, Yoga Beyond the Studio is The True Yoga’s foundational course in Yoga wisdom, meditation, and cultivating a transformative home practice.
