Unlike how Yoga is practised as an exercise and competition today where it is seen if you can knot your limbs or stand on your head or not, Isha Yoga is an unparalleled opportunity to EXPERIENCE Yoga in its full depth and dimension and not only practise it. It works on all aspects - physical, mental, emotional and energy-wise and is not only practised as a physical form to improve flexibility and mental health. Those are definitely the side-benefits but whenever we do Yoga, we are making an attempt to go inward to realise the true immensity of being human.

When you do yoga, you want to internalise everything and one basic step towards any internalisation is to close your eyes. When you eat something tasty or experience pain, you unconsciously close your eyes to experience. Vision is the most outwardly engaging process. If you lose vision among five senses, you lose fifty percent engagement with the world. Half the world is shut off and that is when internalisation happens best.

Using props to get into the asana is exercise and evolving your system internally to experience something profound is yoga. If you are in a certain state and someone tries to physically correct the posture by touching you, it can greatly cause disturbances to your energy system. Yoga works on your energy system and if you use props, let anyone correct your posture or speak in the posture, the profundity of experiencing yoga gets missed and it gets reduced to an exercise form.

Yoga is a very intimate process between you and the ultimate manifestation of creation. So when a union is happening, where is the room for anyone to speak? If you're in a certain level of intimacy with someone and if someone else speaks, will you not find it a disturbance? So it is of utmost importance to do yoga with the right kind of understanding and awareness and not as an exercise/workout form. Speaking triggers a number of changes in your system. You could check this yourself. First sit quietly and check your pulse rate. Then speak intensely and check your pulse rate – it will be very different. The pulse is just one example. Speaking not only changes the physiological parameters – even the energy parameters change dramatically. Above all, yoga is a preliminary meditative state. You cannot talk in your meditation. If you speak during your practises, you will disturb the breath, the mental focus, and the stability of your energy system.

Despite agreeing with the valuable insights shared by mental and emotional health experts, people often struggle to implement them in their lives due to inherent tendencies and information overload. So what we need to do is to enhance our experience of every moment of our life which will make us receptive enough to loosen up our hard-wired tendencies. That is what doing the same yogic practise everyday will do. Your system will learn the practise and not your mind and that is how you will evolve.

If you randomly do asanas without any sequence, not only can it cause damage in ways you cannot even notice but your mental, emotional, and energy states can also get affected. Anything which has the power to transform your life, if handled irresponsibly, can also impair you. That is why it is very important to do yoga in a certain way, in a committed atmosphere, and in a particular sequence. It is not something that anyone invented but the order comes from the observation of the body and how it functions. It is designed in a way that has dynamism to bring you to a stage to experience stillness.

Yes, Yoga definitely means becoming flexible, not just physically, but in every way. That means, whatever life throws at you, wherever you are, you can be fine and not get thrown off by situations around you. Just as rigid muscles limit our movements, inflexible brains are also no good. Only if they are flexible, they are useful. So yoga is about becoming flexible in all aspects of ourselves and receptive to the life process itself.

Yoga does not mean twisting and turning. The word "Yoga" means that in your experience, everything has become one. You can do yoga in whichever way - you can breathe, walk, talk, read, sleep, or stand and do yoga. Yoga is not a specific activity but a particular way of being, a certain dimension. Whether you are in your office or at home, you can do everything and function from a completely different level of consciousness. Every single act that you perform can come from a completely different dimension within you. That is where Yoga takes you experientially and not only do some practises to improve flexibility and remain healthy.