The Purposes of Yoga

By Douglas Brooks

lthough the ancient yoga masters taught that we must integrate minds and hearts and be able to give a full account of our thoughts and feelings, we might ask ourselves if this requirement is still relevant to our practice. Our answer depends on what we think yoga is for, what purpose it serves in our lives. Do we practice yoga primarily for physical exercise? Or do we practice yoga for more spiritual reasons? The ancients created the paths of yoga because they believed these were the best ways, indeed the only ways, to realize our full human potential. No one makes this any clearer than Patanjali, the second-century author of the Yoga Sutra.

Patanjali states that yoga has two distinct purposes or goals. In Chapter II, verse 2 of the Yoga Sutra, he states that yoga's "purpose or goal is to cultivate the experience of equanimity [samadhi]" and "to unravel the causes of negativity." Patanjali tells us, in effect, that yoga will help us figure out and eradicate the reasons why we suffer, even as it leads us to feel the deepest of human experiences.

Because Patanjali describes yoga's two distinct projects-cultivating true equanimity and unraveling the causes of negativities-he suggests that yoga creates two different but yet connected results. A practice that leads to deeper equanimity empowers us to bring our joy to others as well as to ourselves. In this way, we become free to act for a higher purpose. (At the same time, we need to uncover the causes of negative experiences so that we learn to avoid them and thus to become more free from the sources of negativity.)

Becoming more free to live with ourselves confers on us a greater sense of empowerment and joy. Our actions become more meaningful because we know their true purpose. "Freedom to" gives perspective and depth, the feeling that what we do does matter. The world's everyday indignities bother us less, and from our more grounded experience we naturally act more decisively and compassionately. In a complementary way, as we unravel or attenuate the causes of negative experiences, we will feel free from them because we understand more deeply how our experience has evolved. To give a simple example, we learn from experience that touching a hot stove will cause a painful burn, and so thus we learn from understanding the cause how to avoid the effect. "Freedom from" gives us a clear sense of the relationship between past experience and what we might expect in the future. Yogis strive to become free to live life from true equanimity and free from the causes we know will bring us suffering. Our experience of freedom is not "irrational" or anti-rational but rather is rooted in more deeply understanding our relationships: with others, the world, nature, and ourselves. Over time, what is logically true becomes experientially true for us, and each type of experience complements the other.