Yoga has gained a lot of recognition and popularity over the years. According to 2024 survey data published by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), 1 out of 6 adults in the United States of America say they practice yoga. While this is a positive sign, there is a question whether people are aware of the full depth and dimension of this ancient practice beyond the health benefits it brings. Sadhguru delves deeper into this profound science and its power to enhance one’s perception and experience of life.
Sadhguru: “The very word health comes from the root word whole. So if there is no sense of wholeness, this means health is not happening. If you want to generate health from within, each individual has to take it up. We have to bring this—yogic sciences have to come. Now, I’m afraid of using the word yoga in America. So, I keep telling them it’s inner engineering because the yoga that they’re doing just scares me. It is not to simply disparage somebody who’s doing something. It is just that the problem is, there are benefits even in twisting, turning. But I want you to understand this: for this you don’t have to do yoga. You swim half an hour every day—you will notice similar benefits. Go up the mountain, you’ll notice benefits. Suppose we give you, you know, like Apple Air, the thin computer, but you are a caveman. So, you started using this to chop vegetables at home. Hey, it works. But is that why we designed this machine? For that, we could have done something much simpler.”
Sadhguru: “This is designed for a completely different dimension. Health is a consequence. But for this we have what is called upa yoga, or we have systems called angamardana. You do that kind of thing with the body that if you’re here, you don’t even know if your body exists or not. There is a sense of bodiliness about you. Unless this comes into your life, there is no real sense of ease. Simply because the entire energy system has fired up. The energy system which is called pranamaya kosha—there are 72,000 nadis. Normally for a healthy, normal active person, if approximately somewhere between 12 to 30% of this is active, you will live a complete life in a normal sense.”
Sadhguru: “So what is the rest for? The rest is essentially that as energies move into the rest of the nadis, your perception is enhanced because the greatest thing for a human being is not just to build a huge body. The greatest thing for a human being is expansion of experience. If it finds a very basic physical expression, we call this sexuality. If it finds an emotional expression, we call this love. If it finds a conscious expression, then we call this yoga. The word yoga means union. Union means you manage to obliterate the boundaries of your physical nature. The basic premise of Hatha yoga is like this: for every human experience that you go through, for every level of consciousness or mental and emotional status that you go through, your body naturally tends to take a certain posture. Conversely, the science of Hatha is that if you consciously bring your body to a certain posture and hold it there, the very way you think, feel, understand, and perceive life will alter itself.”
Sadhguru: “We have engineered the world in so many wonderful ways that we want. A little bit of engineering needs to happen to this because you have to agree with me on this one thing: this is the most sophisticated machine on this planet. But have you read the user’s manual? We have learned how to read a language, but we have not learned how to read this book, which is written by the creator himself. So for this, a certain level of discipline and focus and attention has to come. Unless it comes as a culture, individual people doing it will benefit them individually. But it will be difficult to sustain individually unless there is a supportive culture around us. I think that is what we need to strive for.”
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