27/04/2025
It has always bothered me that the majority of people (in the West anyway) think of yoga as a form of physical exercise. Now, after twenty three years of teaching and nearly forty years since my first class, I continue to affirm that the reason I find yoga so endlessly fascinating and fulfilling is because it is a vehicle into the mind. Yoga techniques, including many meditation practices, guide us in the most uncharted, deepest areas of the psyche, and allow us to explore a holistic concept of mind. As well as going much deeper in existential terms, this concept of mind also includes the body, recognising that the body stores mental and emotional experience and that any healing path cannot separate mind and body.
One day each month for the next four (of the 18 month sadhana course we are running) will be devoted to the model of human experience called the chakras, and we have already spent three days on this subject. Of course that is no time at all, merely a tiny introduction. Nevertheless, along with many other subjects in the yoga philosophy field, it is an opening to understanding yoga in a different way. As Jung succinctly expressed, “The chakras.. represent a real effort to give a symbolic theory of the psyche. The psyche is something so highly complicated, so vast in extent and so rich in elements unknown to us… that we always turn to symbols in order to try to represent what we know about it.” (Carl Jung, in his essay, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga)
For a longer piece see my Substack below... The photo is me (second from left ) and friends completing our two year yoga teacher training, in Bihar India, 2003.
I am finding it really fulfilling to run our yoga sadhana course, which is eighteen months of diving into, reflecting upon and learning more about yoga philosophy and practice.
