JOHN SCHUMACHER (Founder and Director, Unity Woods Yoga Center): Yoga is a spiritual practice for me. I was 25, and at that stage of my life I had been questioning a lot of things about what was important and not important, what were my values.I found that what yoga said about the way things are was very much in line with what I had begun to discover on my own. Up to that point, it had been very difficult for me to find much in my western philosophical and spiritual studies that really addressed that.
Yoga is, according to Patanjali, who is the author of THE YOGA SUTRA, the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind, so that when the mind becomes quiet -- that's yoga.There are several major schools of yoga. The kind I do is Iyengar-style hatha yoga, named for B.K.S. Iyengar. He just celebrated his 85th birthday and still practices daily.
There's always a correlation between mind and body. Anything that happens in the body has a direct effect on what goes on in the mind, and vice versa. It's a two-way street. Quieting the body down is a way to bring some quietness to the mind. There is a relationship between keeping the body still or rhythmic that brings about a steadiness and quietness of mind.
In the practice of yoga, we observe that the mind is very, very busy. It's sometimes referred to as "monkey mind." It's all over the place like a monkey in a tree. And through the variety of the practices of yoga, we eventually come to a place of slowing down, of becoming quieter, a little more focused, a little steadier.
