3 things about yoga I rarely hear anyone talk about 🤔

I have often said that seeing yoga as just stretching is like seeing the ocean as just water 🌊. To think that means you miss the truth of the life it carries and the depth it holds. There is still more to learn about the ocean as it's an ever-evolving process. And remember, life itself crawled out of it 🐟.

Yoga goes beyond stretching and sweating. Here are three things about yoga I rarely hear anyone talk about. Maybe because the yoga world is so caught up in nonsense and nonsensical claims that amongst all that, the real magic has been lost.

1) As your breathing improves 😮‍💨, and your awareness of your breath improves, you start to feel the interconnectedness of everything around you. On each inhale, the universe, the stars that exploded billions of years ago, come through you ✨. In that slow pattern of breathing, you come to the realisation that you are nothing in the vastness of existence. Yet paradoxically, you are a part of that existence itself. You are no-thing yet everything.

It's the most organic spiritual experience you can have, one that will leave you lost for words. As the poet Kabir says, the drop doesn't just exist in the ocean, the ocean itself exists in the drop 💧.

This is the first and only organic understanding of what the word yoga (meaning union) truly means.

2) If you can prioritise your breathing over performance, you create a connection with the part of you (your physiology) that drives who you are 🧠❤️. How you think, how you feel and how you react to people, problems and the world around you. When you connect (or re-connect) with yourself (your physiology), you start to manage yourself better.

The very reason we can feel lost and unregulated is because of the disconnect we have created within ourselves. And when we exercise, or turn yoga into exercise, we continue this disconnect. But yoga (and consciously breathing better) fixes that disconnect. Hence yoga meaning to bring two things together.

It's not a discovery of something new but a homecoming. A balance between the anatomy (the body) and the physiology (the brain and nervous system). This is the science and the tradition.

3) When the poses get harder, you learn more about yourself than you realise. There is nothing to add to your repertoire to master your handstand and arm balances 🤸🏾. There is only fear to let go of.

Each pose reveals to you what and who you are, and what you were always capable of.

Practise yoga beyond flexibility, and let the practice school you. This is what I mean when I say "let the practice of yoga be its own philosophy". If you connect better to the way you breathe in yoga (stop forcing and controlling it), your life will quietly enrich itself in ways you can't possibly imagine.

There are depths in the ocean, and in life, that we haven't even begun to explore. The good news is, we don't need to travel anywhere to find it. We just need to breathe better. And it's often ignored because it seems too simple. But as I write in my book, man has gone to the edge of the universe and explored the furthest boundaries of time, yet he has never been further from himself.

Namaskar,

Zahir

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