All Life Is Yoga

Most beginning students will tell you they got into yoga to alleviate back pain, relieve stress, or become more flexible-fairly simple responses. But the reasons you practice might not be as straightforward as they seem. It's entirely possible that after closely examining your innermost motives, you'll find nothing more than a hankering for looser hamstrings-but don't bet on it. Yoga is full of surprising twists and turns.

It's no secret that we often do things for reasons we're totally unaware of; sometimes our unconscious motives become clear only after a good deal of self-reflection. So it's important to realize that questioning the intent of our practice inevitably leads us to inquire about the meaning of our life as well. We could just as pertinently ask: Why am I really alive? At the outset, it's natural to assume that our practice and our life are totally separate, that we practice for an hour or so a day and then forget about it. But after a while, the two inevitably begin to merge. As Sri Aurobindo, the great 20th-century Indian sage and progenitor of Integral Yoga, reminds us, "All life is yoga."

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