The Goal of Yoga is Awakening

When I am meeting new people and they learn that I am “into” yoga, what they think yoga is quickly becomes apparent. I know that you will find this familiar: “I know I should do yoga, but when I tried, I was not good at it, I am just not flexible enough” and also “So, do you stand on your head every day?”

Their assumption is that I am practicing yoga postures, that I am a pretzel, and skilled at gymnastic feats of contortion. In their minds, yoga is a physical practice, a fitness practice.

However, if I am introduced as a meditation teacher, I hear something a little different, though it does have an echo to it: “I know I should do meditation, but when I tried, I was no good at it, my mind won’t stop thinking” or sometimes “How many hours a day do you meditate?”

One key point is that they are not identifying yoga with meditation, and they are not associating meditation with yoga. Yet, as we know, meditation is a key component of yoga. For most of the history of yoga it had a lot more to do with meditation than postural practice.

The goal of yoga is yoga

In one sense the definition of yoga is circular: Yoga is both a process and the goal. To be sure though it is not about nailing the perfect crane pose or even getting your heels to the floor in a downward facing dog! Yes, we have all heard it, “yoga” from the Sanskrit yuj, means union.

If we look back in the traditional sources this has a slightly different flavour depending on which tradition you are in, but there is always a sense of union with the divine. Yoga is mokṣa, liberation, bhodi, enlightened, awakened, kaivalya, isolation (of puruṣa from prakṛti), nirvāṇa, extinguishment (of the cycle of rebirth), mukti, liberation, enlightenment.

Whichever tradition you are following, while it might be most true to say that the goal is the yoga, nevertheless, practices are offered to gain the goal, and they too tend to go by the name of yoga.

If we come back to the current misunderstanding that yoga is a practice of fancy postures, I have never heard of anyone attaining enlightenment from being an ace at caturaṇga daṇdāsana. If postural practice helps you to sit well for the real work of meditation, all the better. Likewise, if a postural practice fosters discipline and concentration, builds somatic awareness, and it is undertaken with a meditative attitude, it cannot lead you astray. But when liberation is indeed your goal, you could do it without the postural practice. Yoga does not depend on advanced āsana.

The goal of yoga is not health, physical or mental

In the literature of the wellness industry, yoga has become a bit of a theme, and since we seem to have to justify ourselves in terms society understands, and come up with some kind of proof of benefit, postural yoga and meditation have been subjected to evidence based clinical studies to discover what health benefits can be ascribed to it. Which is great, because the benefits are there. We learn of the positive outcomes for blood pressure, pain relief, anxiety, depression, and the list goes on. This is all fantastic and I hope that people will indeed turn up, start a practice and reap these benefits.

In ancient days a lot was written about yoga. Nobody at all wrote about the correct alignment of your feet in standing postures nor about which postures will help to bring down your blood pressure and which ones to avoid. Ayurveda addressed health. Yoga did not.

To be clear though, health benefits were never the goal of yoga. Rather like flexibility being a side effect of a consistent postural practice, wellbeing and health are by-products too.

Awakening to true nature is possible

The goal is to awaken to our true nature, which is Pure Consciousness and which is everything.

We can use terms like Consciousness, Awareness, True Nature, Essence Nature for what is to be realized. Awakening is a good term for the process of recognizing our true nature, for it is indeed as if we were asleep when we did not “see that” and so it is like waking up.

Enlightenment would literally mean the light has come in, or on, but that is not quite right, for it was/is always “on,” except that the “eyes” are shut. While it has been much used, enlightenment is not my preferred term. It has also been so bandied about with reference to some few saintly individuals that it seems to have gained an aura of the unattainable.

What the ancients wrote about was their understanding of what liberation meant, and what are the best ways of attaining it. Why did they spend so many words on this subject? They obviously considered the goal attainable or they would not have bothered committing it to literature. Nowadays Awakening tends to be considered an impossible goal, suitable for saints, not for the ordinary person. There are communities where people talk about their Awakening experiences, but generally it tends not to be talked about at all.

I spent years not talking about it, even in yoga circles, for fear of being thought whacky, even self-talking myself out of taking what I had experienced seriously. To paraphrase some famous Monkees lyrics: “I thought Awakening was only true in fairy tales, Meant for someone else but not for me.”

Thanks to some wonderful Awakened folk who became public teachers, like Adyashanti, Rupert Spira, Richard Miller, Christopher Wallis, Jeff Foster, we now have living examples who are telling us, Awakening is possible. You will need to dedicate yourself to stabilise in Awakening, but what do you want to dedicate yourself to, liberation, or the perfect firefly pose? We must choose sometimes. The real goal of yoga? Or not?

It is rare, though possible, that Awakening is a single event, suddenly there and never lost again. For most it is a process. A shift of perspective may have happened that shifts back but we cannot forget. If we are lucky, we will already have discovered a teacher and a path that works for us, and the unfolding will proceed. But it might take years and years for that to all come together. It has for me, but in recent years the old paradigm has started to unravel and the yoga journey has really begun. It is all about Awakening.

About the Author

Tina Shettigara is a senior yoga teacher with Yoga Australia, an IRI certified teacher of iRest® Yoga Nidra and a somatic movement teacher in the style of Thomas Hanna.