Life must always go on and Yoga is not about an escape from life. Yoga's about a way of dealing with life more effectively; to be able to involve oneself with one's family, one's friends, one's social commitments, one's job and yet at the same time maintain one's centre.
When people come to Yoga, they are perhaps coming to it at the end of a long series of alternatives, and they're looking for something that's going to act very quickly. But Yoga is not a quick answer.
Yoga is a product of Eastern thought. A further complication is that the early Yoga teachers were both Indian and Hindu. So from the late 1800's and early 1900's the Yoga teachers who came across were as interested in Hinduism as in Yoga. Often what we were being taught was a mixture of two different systems.
My own interest in Yoga came from a vague understanding of Indian thought and Indian philosophy in the late sixties and early seventies and from looking at the idea of meditation and at what meditation was.
Yoga aims to bring about a situation where the mind is quieter and more effective. It's not only about relaxation, it's also about improving our energy. It's about making us more decisive and at the same time better able to judge a situation clearly.
