Why Practise Yoga?
Why should anyone do yoga?
God gave us a body and mind with its own abilities to perform and interact with the world. God also gave us some basic concepts about life, its relationship with the cosmos, and the realization of our deeper spirtual nature. Yoga is the system through which we can discover the source of harmony and peace, shanti, in our lives. It is that awareness which, in the course of human evolution, continues undistracted by personal involvement in materialism. Evolution is going beyond materialism.
Why should the body be worked on at all?
Why do we need to cook food? Why do we go through an intricate process of devising new methods of preparing meals? For our sensual enjoyment. In the same way, the body has to be worked upon because, due to the modern lifestyle, it attracts different kinds of diseases, illnesses and imbalances which hinder the growth of the mind and make it feel pain and suffering. So, for good health and physical well-being certain practices have been devised which make our body perform controlled movements in a way that eliminates the imbalances of the body.
Is there a guarantee that yoga will produce all these results?
There is no guarantee. We have to listen to the experiences of people who have felt definite changes happening in their lives. A sincere aspirant of yoga will experience those changes naturally. Nothing in life is guaranteed. There is no guarantee that you will be successful in your work and not fail, but still you do your best. So why do you think of a guarantee in relation to yoga?
Because yoga has the aura of being a perfected system that will take one to higher levels of consciousness.
That is because the people who have perfected it have experienced these higher levels of consciousness.
Swami Niranjanananda Saraswati
Excerpts from an interview by Dignity Dialogue, Mumbai