Introduction

Yoga is one of six fundamental systems of Indian thought collectively known as darsana, or "sight; way of seeing." As one of the classical darshanas ,the yoga path is actually a very precise and tangible metaphysical methodology for developing a greater clarity of the way in which we "see" and "know" ourselves. Yoga means to "unite" or "yoke". As Huston Smith writes in the classic text The Illustrated World's Religions, "Yoga is a method of training designed to lead to integration or union. It includes physical exercises, but its ultimate goal is" the yoking of individual soul to universal spirit. Although yoga today is often taught and practiced as a pursuit for health and fitness in order to accommodate a changing world, the spiritual roots still nourish today's authentic yoga teachings.

Yoga can also be defined as "mindfulness", or the process of directing the attention towards whatever it is we are doing at the moment. Thus, to the yogi, although there is inevitably desire for progress and change, the "process" of actually doing yoga is the appropriate focus for the attention, and not the "progress" on the path. Through the practice of various yoga techniques, the attention is constantly directed towards the present moment, often through the vehicle of the breath, thus uniting the mind, for a moment or two, "here and now," with the body. Understanding yoga as a means for "bringing together" apparently diverse elements and separate entities, is a comfortable interpretation for most people and a graceful allusion to the omnipresent movement implicit in all aspects of yoga, whether the physical, mental, or spiritual disicplines.

Classically, Yoga is defined in Patanjali's Yoga Sutra, one of the most significant of the yoga texts, as "citta vritti nirodahah" or "the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind". In yoga, these vritti, or "waves" of the mind are referred to as monkey mind. The "practice" of yoga is this actual effort to direct the mind towards one-pointedness, without distraction or interruption, and to calm and steady this wild monkey that jumps around in the jungle from branch to branch. It is in this state of focussed mind, which takes many years of yoga practice to achieve, that a greater clarity of vision and deeper understanding of "self" develops. Resting in the present moment, the mind and body are joined and individual consciousness can then "know" its connection to universal, or "divine" consciousness. Once experienced, this state is recognized as the true nature of "Self", or "self-realization", and liberates the individual, according to classical yoga thought, from the cause of human suffering, which is the illusion of isolation and separation from universal reality, or the Infinite. 

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