Yoga is a mind, body and soul practice that has a wide possibility in case it is practiced and utilized in the right sense of the word. At present, this yoga is most commonly known as an exercise form and changing this particular belief in people is an important yet huge task to fulfill. Yoga is not just about losing weight, fixing the back pain or just getting healthy. These things are rather results that come with regular practice of yoga but they are not the purpose with which yoga is done.
Exercising is a very new and developed idea. In the bygone era, it was something done by only wrestlers and the people who went for the war. The rest just worked. There was plenty of physical activity involved, so automatically people used to exercise.
Coming back to the primary topic, yoga is not just an ancient form of exercise and people must get this belief out of their heads if they want to become a true yogi. When a person practices Surya Namaskar, the focus is not just on the muscles but on becoming one with the light that the sun transmits or becoming one with the source from which all energy is attained. The next question that arises is how can a person get there and how long will it take to become a yogi? The right answer is that it depends, this can be done in a moment, a millennium or it can be never.
The person who wants to achieve the status of becoming a yogi must understand the subtlety of yoga. There is a strong difference between mental and spiritual knowledge. You can understand or experience a thing mentally by looking at it from the outside or by comparing it with other things, etc. However, you can only experience a spiritual thing when you become one with it. You must be like a moth in search of his idol, the flame in case you want to become a true yogi.
If your goal is just to become a yoga teacher then just a couple of months of the yoga teacher training in India will be good enough but if your goal is to become a yogi then it can happen within seconds. You just need to allow it to happen and the process will follow.
TO BECOME A YOGI:
Even if a small element of what it means to become a yogi comes into the lives of people then the authentic aspect of what it means to be alive can come to life. Bending, turning and twisting your body has its advantages for physical health but there is a lot more to this when it comes to becoming a yogi. A sense of being a little more than the physical body is an important thing. As human beings, we cannot be like that all the time because we have roles to play. However, for a few moments in one day, we can achieve that feeling. If we practice to keep this feeling alive then things that we have never experienced will start to happen. This will mean that you are allowing the true dimension of your being to function just as it should. This dimension is the soul, not the body.
In case you do not become a yogi in a way, your life is going to put you through multiple circumstances that will make you feel like hiding away from the beautiful phenomena that life is. When someone wants to stay enclosed and not interact with other people, when they are unable to walk with an open mind and heart, when they don’t love everything that they see and are unable to see, they are most definitely missing out on living their life as it should be lived. This is an indication that they wish to be safe.
In order to be a yogi, it means to live in a true union with yourself and living without the confines that people built around themselves. It means to breach all the boundaries that prevail in the physical while touching and experiencing everything in the Universe. Until the time a human being has this quality, there is a good possibility that they are hiding away from their life.
All of us can be saved from life and make it a beautiful experience but there is no chance that we will be saved by death. If we understand what it means to be a yogi in the true sense then we might live a little longer than usual. After knowing that our life is a limited period of time on Earth, do you wish to live completely or hide away from it? There are so many aspects of life that can be enjoyed in their true form. In case you are entirely conscious of the fact that our time is ticking away as each second passes by, all of us will naturally long to become a yogi.
LIVING LIFE IN THE SPIRITUAL NOT PHYSICAL:
Traveling physically and experiencing the entire universe is absolutely out of question. A way in which we can touch everything and understand the meaning of life in all its dimensions is by moving beyond the limitations of being a physical body. The method in which yoga is done is designed in a way that it helps in experiencing what it means to become one with your soul for a few moments. You can free yourself from the compulsive and repetitive nature of this life by experiencing it in the true sense.
At present, almost 99 out of 100 people are all thinking meaningless thoughts because they are thinking out of compulsiveness and restriction. Doing yoga is about saving yourself from the perils of life and the compulsiveness of the body. It is about being protective of yourself and being comfortable with your body. In case you do not have a body, you would not have been looking at its concerns, you would have been looking at its possibilities. The important question is what does it mean to be human?
If you want to experience this life in the true sense by becoming a yogi then you have to drop all the limitations that are created by the ego. Become one with nature and everything that surrounds you so your body becomes just a stepping stone for you to understand the meaning of life. If you learn to do this in the best of ways then your life and you will become a tremendous possibility to achieve so many things that you wouldn’t have thought of until now.
