The viniyoga of Yoga is about Relationship……
The viniyoga of Yoga is the application of the principles that link together to offer possibilities to enhance your relationship with yourself through your practice.
This opens the possibility that a deepening of your practice comes not from adding more difficult postures, but from refining your relationship with what you already have.
Life is already full of pressures to go for the newest model, to bring more in from the outside rather than concentrating on bringing more out from the inside.
So we need to take care that we do not become an avid consumer of a new posture or new technique purely for the sake of it.
Yoga is a relationship within which you commit yourself to depth of involvement rather than breadth of involvement.
In that sense, Yoga is no different from how any relationship with someone or something we care for and wish to spend time with should be.
From this relationship we can eventually start to experience the fruits that arise from the time, care, effort and attention.
Perhaps keeping the following words of a teacher from long ago in our mind as we adapt Yoga to suit our particular needs:
“Only through Yoga Yoga is known,
Only through Yoga Yoga changes.
One who is patient at Yoga,
enjoys the fruits over a long time.”
Extract first published in 1996 in ‘The Guide to Natural Therapies’
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