Yoga Ethics & Values
Exploring Yoga Philosophy and Spirituality: The Ethical Path to Self-Realization
By Dennis Bluthardt, Namaste Studios
Yoga is not only a physical practice in which the goal comes in different postures and the level of flexibility one can achieve. Exemplifying how much yoga provides multiple paths to follow, none strictly bound to physics. The Yoga Sutras demonstrate the importance of yoga as having an origin deeply rooted in spirituality and philosophy. These texts pose the same questions as those formulated at the foundation of some of the oldest religions. Yoga insists that you look inward and pose these questions to yourself, intimidating you with the uncalled-for challenges of discovering your life’s purpose and the meaning behind all that you have experienced.
The Yamas and Niyamas are the basic ethical guidelines for following these paths. As yoga begins implementing its guiding principles of non-violence, truthfulness, non-stealing, etc., into everyday life, changes occur personally and in those you interact with. Even if it’s just one less negative interaction a day, it’s one less negative interaction that the entire world experiences in a day. This yoga philosophy positively impacts others, and they also dedicate themselves to the practice.
Yoga itself, as great an escape from reality as it can provide, encourages you to face reality head-on. It motivates you to analyze and evaluate. And, most frighteningly of all, it challenges you to understand others.
Understanding Yoga Philosophy
Yoga philosophy is much more than what poses and what to eat. It is a massive, complex system of thought that has evolved over thousands of years and continues to evolve today.
Many of the first recorded texts of yoga philosophy place much greater emphasis on how to live, think, and find peace.
Different aspects of yoga philosophy have been emphasized throughout history and in other parts of the world. Still, historically, you can trace the roots of this philosophy back to the Vedic texts (~1500–500 BCE) of the Indian subcontinent. This philosophy then developed into the Upanishads, the classical period (~500 BCE–500 CE), the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, and the Bhagavad Gita before growing into hundreds, if not thousands, of different essential texts.
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (c. 2nd Century BC to 2nd Century AD) contain much of what would today be considered the framework of yoga philosophy. According to Patanjali, yoga consists of an 8-limbed path to enlightenment called Ashtanga, which consists of the following: Yama, attitudes towards our environment; Niyama, attitudes towards ourselves; Asana, physical postures; Pranayama, restraint or expansion of breath or life force; withdrawal of the senses, concentration, meditation, and superconscious state.
These “limbs” must be developed in conjunction with the rest. One must work to follow all eight paths; as one evolves along this path, all “limbs” should improve together.
The Bhagavad Gita is another very famous yoga philosophy text. It describes the nature of society and the correct behaviors that should be performed in life. Some interpret this text to mean that yoga should only be practiced by older generations who have already experienced life.
This text more accurately describes how to align your thoughts and behaviors to live a good life than strictly: “Only old people should enjoy this.” Again, it mainly depends on the interpretation and cultural context, as this is the case with most yoga philosophy texts.
The Role of Spirituality in Yoga
Yoga spirituality is a broad context for complete and individual personal growth. Most religions have systems of belief, dogma, and rituals. In contrast, yoga spirituality pivots on the individual experience. The emphasis is on doing the “work” yourself. By doing various practices, you get to meet yourself on the inside.
There are many consciousness-revealing practices, from meditation to pranayama (breath control), poses, chanting practices, and revealing all. Insightful clarity will shine an intuitive, new light on your new path. A force of the universe (a.k.a. grace) will nudge and cause situations to happen to you. You’ll start to notice them.
But you will also start confronting yourself, those scary parts of you. You will make new choices in moving forward, which will help you become free of the “stuckness” in your life. The angry episodes and negative, undermining thoughts and ideas of your life will be replaced by the true essence of who you are. Hovering inside, you will notice you have a calm, quiet presence. You will realize you are the constant that has always been there.
Practices such as meditation and pranayama give you some insight about yourself. The systematic processes of such a practice remove the stress from your body. A new body-mind is born that feels whole, united, and peaceful. You will become that regularly, every day.
Chanting lets you use your throat like a girl jumping rope might play and sing with her friends. A community of others, like you, is inquiring about something better in themselves and the world. This community will surround you and elevate you, making your experience taste much better.
If you can describe anger inside yourself, that description indicates that there are two. You are one, the describer. The angry is the other, the described. The more you shine your light of understanding into yourself, the more peaceful you will become. The anger fades away.
You will join the tribe in the “field,” as Rumi puts it…all whilst parts of your anatomy press on tense sheaths of painful nerves in your muscles.
You will enjoy the journey and the practice that takes you there.
Become an enjoyer of life’s journey. Be equipped for where to go on this pathless path. You will finally be directional and precise with discernment as you choose by free will in uncertainty. You will also enroll in a practice that gives you insight into yourself.
Your mind will know its place. It will behave. You will trust that process over and above everything that anyone will say or what anyone will think, even over and above your left-brained planner of your imagination.
Besides, it’s not what you do but how you do it. The incredible joy of constant calmness is yours to claim, but you must set it up. You know what to do to prepare for the next step. You will move with the right action.
Then, you will stretch your hips like you’ll never believe it is possible with precision alignment and technical know-how.
Consequently, you won’t have any of those debilitating postural/structural diseases of your neck and lower back, like the 98% of the world who “shop” around taking every kind of chemical to battle pain. As an advanced yoga person or yogini, you will be a free man or woman outside that system, living the dream. Enjoy your fantastic breath every day and every moment as you can keep a calm rifle of a breath. Cultivate continually a rhythm of peace inside your harmonious mind, body, and spirit. Be free.
The ability to feel such joyful bliss indicates that your healing chemistry is flowing. You have prepared your well-being, and you are the one who is the most capable. Find the juice. If you want to improve, heal yourself and watch yourself improve.
Yoga Ethics and Values
The Yamas and Niyamas supply yoga’s ethical underpinnings. A sort of premodern GPS for traveling along life’s path with as little friction as possible, the Yamas (non-violence, truthfulness, and others) help practitioners learn how to handle their dealings with the world around them. The Niyamas (contentment, self-discipline, and more) offer suggestions for optimizing one’s self-conduct or self-care techniques.
Think about it: how would one incorporate the principle of non-violence (Ahimsa) into one’s day? (You must select “kindness” the entire day while conversing with colleagues. All word choices should be friendly.) What would that look like if I asked you to go after contentment (Santosha) for a day? (I think it would be something like “thought journaling,” in which you scribbled down notable things that cropped up over 24 hours. Items “jotted” must be thoughts for which one was grateful.)
Christian Kiefer Ph.D., “Can Classical Yoga Improve One’s Ethical Framework or Modify Ethical Behavior?
Fast-forward the clock after a few successful weeks of engaging in an activity like this, and behavior modification can and does occur. This is solely self-guided. One gravitates toward living a “better life,” drawn to the opportunity by one’s interest and determination.
The Journey to Self-Realization
Yoga philosophy, going beyond the asanas or physical practice and understanding yoga’s spirituality, can be transformative for self-discovery. Yoga is a practice that looks inward and helps human beings understand themselves. When you practice yoga, you constantly evaluate where you are with your practice, how you are feeling, how you got there, and why you’re even doing this in the first place. Yoga is a sequence of questions: questions about your thoughts, emotions, movements, and physical being.
Self-realization, the elusive nature of personal truth and self-acceptance, is ultimately the goal of every yoga practice. If the primary principle of yoga is to understand our habits and ourselves better, there’s no telling what yoga can unravel for us individually. Some people could look very predictable. For others, stripping down our identities and social customs reveals the raw dynamics of humans who thought they knew who they were forever. But if you’re a yoga practitioner reading this, you know there’s no way on earth ~you~ could have embodied the heady tune of the “settled measurement.”
Whether we realize it or not, humans crave contact and connectivity. The purest nature of this connectivity is almost always supported. The purpose of understanding yoga philosophy could be similar: to navigate one’s way to this level of the self. You would most likely need a community of like-minded individuals, a tribe!
Yoga isn’t just about performing challenging balancing poses in fashionable workout gear! If it were only a physical practice (asana), it wouldn’t involve philosophical teachings, spiritual practices, ethical guidelines, or other aspects of yoga-like meditation and breathwork (pranayama). Whenever you study yoga, you’ll find that Philosophy is the brain. It nourishes the thinking part of the brain with complex, profound teachings about the nature of reality, self, and the universe. Discovering, debunking, reintegrating, settling into, and being with philosophical exploration and contemplation help direct one’s beautiful, curious human mind toward more beneficial mental states. Spirituality is the heart. As a practice of self-realization, yoga is, by nature, a spiritual practice. That means it involves exploring your innermost being, which typically involves a lot of soul searching (hopefully, with a tour guide like a skillful, experienced teacher). It often consists of connecting with something you perceive to be bigger, more significant, more expansive than the, you know, the connection to a higher power or consciousness thing and unraveling the thread of the personal human journey.
Ethics is how we behave in society. Yoga teaches the practice of many timeless ethical principles, the most popular and widely known being the five yamas and five niyamas. The yamas and niyamas are restraints and observances or moral and ethical guidelines for interacting with others. The yamas and niyamas are taught in a non-dogmatic (i.e., non-forceful, flexible, considerate, holistic, caring, kind) way.
The personal application piece of yoga is part of the juicy experience (i.e., “the good stuff”) of yoga practice.
Now, it’s your turn to get some “juiciness” from the practice of yoga!
