Photo: Wikimedia/Marcocarvalho
The gymnastic element of yoga is perhaps the most characteristic aspect of this multi-faceted tradition – at least for Westerners to whom even an adult merely sitting cross-legged appears exotic – but there is much more to yoga than forming the dough of the body into the shapes of human pretzels. In yoga, the mind is posed as much as the body is posed. In fact, the two cannot be separated. The mind is yoked to the body and where one goes the other goes too, so sculpting the body also sculpts the mind. Yoga leverages this wholeness for the purpose of shaping the soul, uniting and reuniting the self with itself, with the world and with God.