Yoga does not mean twisting your body, holding your breath, hanging upside down or doing something like this. Essentially, if you are using the very process of life as a stepping stone for a higher possibility, if every aspect of your life has become a process of growth and a staircase to move upward, then you are in the state of yog. There are many systems and practices to create such a situation and make your body, mind and everything into a possibility and not a hurdle in your life. But just the practice is not yoga. How you live is yoga. The word “yoga” literally means union. Your separation has come only because you are clinging to your identity. Essentially, yoga means dissolving your identity. Whatever activity you are doing, you get identified with it and are prejudiced. That is the nature of mind. Once you get identified with something, your mind works only around that identity. If you say, “I am an Indian,” you think and feel Indian, isn’t it? “Nation” is just an idea, but the moment you identify yourself with that idea, the way you think, feel, understand and experience life changes. This happens to you at many levels.
The moment you identify yourself, you enter a discriminatory process. The whole process of yoga is to distance yourself from your identity so that you are able to handle your identity the way you need to and want to handle it. If you dissolve your identity, this whole existence is one burst of life. Science is proving beyond any doubt that every atom, every subatomic particle in the existence is in constant communication with everything else. Why are you missing out? You are missing out because you identified yourself with something. So yoga means to dissolve your identity in such a way that if you sit here, you actually experience yourself as the existence itself, not as a separate identity. If you experience the whole existence as a part of yourself even for one moment, you will never be the same again. It is possible for every human being to know this.
