yoga

In the course of my yoga teacher training we discussed many of the influential yoga texts such as Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras, the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita. However, our class understandably relied almost entirely on "secondary sources" such as Nicolai Bachman's The Path of the Yoga Sutras and Deborah Adele's The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice. I recently finished Eknath Easwaran's translation of The Bhagavad Gita, but it required a lot of commentary for me to begin to appreciate the messages, many of which are connected to war metaphors.

George Boole reportedly said, "A real mathematician ... must be something more than a mere mathematician, he must be also something of a poet." It seems to me that something similar could be said about being a yoga teacher in 2020, and that a successful teacher must be more than a mere yoga teacher. Yoga isn't "just exercise" anymore than it is "mere mathematics." But what else more "must" a yoga teacher be?

Yogis around the world regard Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras as a foundational text. Patañjali offers helpful advice on a wide variety of topics, but this article will focus on just one: loving-kindness.