Monday Notes: Becoming a Yoga Teacher Helped Me to Understand Balance

BRIEF BACKGROUND OF YOGA At the beginning of yoga teacher training, we were advised that we could read the following books if we wanted to: The Bhagavad Gita, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, and/or The Yamas & Niyamas. For those of you who know me, my answer was YES, please. I read the first two before in-person class, and the latter is in progress because it’s more like theory-to-practice; you work on a concept each month. I’m so glad I chose to read these texts because they serve as foundational resources that outline yoga as a spiritual practice. The Gita, as most people refer to it, is the seminal text for yoga. Period. Similarly, The Yoga Sutras offers a more detailed perspective of what is called Raja yoga, the royal path focused on meditation. In Raja yoga, asanas (yoga poses) are a very minimal part of the practice because meditation is the goal. To this end, out of 196 sutras, only three mention anything about poses and postures. But to be clear, meditation, breathwork, and…