I Love Yoga
I love yoga and I love the spiritual and material soil in which yoga was planted and cultivated. India nurtured yoga and has feasted on its fruits for millennia.
The word yoga generally refers to the indigenous wisdom traditions of India. My approach to studying or teaching about these traditions is rooted in reverence.
The stream of yoga has flowed through the teachings and lives of countless gurus. Some wrote their teachings down, or were written about by their disciples; some just lived and embodied yoga and nourished the aspiring hearts of those who came to learn and grow. Texts have recorded some of these teachings and lives, snapshots of yoga’s course through time. These texts hold more than words: they hold vibration, energy, concentrated wisdom in which we can wrap ourselves, immerse and bathe. Many yoga texts were originally written in Sanskrit, which is a sacred language that has an inherent power of concentration. Big ideas can be densely packed into a few words. Unraveling them in English is an art and something I love to do.
India’s indigenous wisdom traditions use the word yoga to describe a set of practices that support movement along a path which leads to a state of being. The same word is used for all three: the practices, the path, and the state.
The practices of yoga support movement along a path of yoga. This path leads from the experience of separation and isolation to the experience of unity and oneness. It leads from the embodied self feeling like it's an individual entity involved in an existential competition against other individuals for access to scarce resources to the embodied self knowing that it is one with all existence, that there are no others and no scarcity. This state of yoga isn’t theoretical or abstract. It’s not an idea. It’s a fully embodied realization that progressively pervades the human experience until nothing is left out.
Practices are yoga practices if they support forword movement along the path of yoga. The practices may come from a yoga text and have historical roots in India’s wisdom traditions. But yoga is broad, and in its most expansive sense was more about experimentation than dogma. The focus has been on the results - if the practice reliably results in a movement toward the state of yoga, then it’s yoga.
Yoga asks the essential questions of humanity: Who am I? Why am I alive? What is going on here? Who are these other beings around me? It is a longing and a seeking and a progressive discovery. What it longs for and seeks and discovers is the underlying, fundamental truth of oneness. You and I and God and Earth and the Sun and stars and ghosts and trees and the ocean and the field of energy in which we live and move are all One. And just like you are one being composed of many individual life forms (bacteria, viruses, etc), this One that comprises All is self-aware and intentional. It knows that it exists. It breathes and creates. And It loves. Love is the medium of all existence, the power that attracts and draws us toward each other and God and yoga.
Recently in a yoga philosophy session in the current teacher training, I shared a few principles on which my teaching rests: God is real and realizable. We are all evolving toward realizing God. There are forces of creation that support that evolutionary movement and forces that inhibit it. Yoga is the conscious intention to align with the forces that support spiritual evolution and navigate the forces that resist.
Every session is different and we explore many different topics, but these principles flow through and hold them all. And I always invite our learning community to share in reverence for the land and people from which the teachings of yoga arose.
Matthew is a yoga teacher, singer, songwriter, entrepreneur, nonprofit executive, bhakta, and a lover of Indian culture and spirituality. He first visited India in 2000, and has been studying Sanskrit, yoga philosophy, and yoga practices from various traditions and lineages since then. He runs retreats in north and south India, and has brought over 150 people to India, many for the first time.
Matthew is President and CEO of Auroville International USA, a nonprofit organization that supports the unique and dynamic spiritual city of Auroville in Tamil Nadu, and Co-Director of Shraddha Yoga, an organization that seeks to embody the spirit of yoga. He teaches yoga philosophy on retreats and in yoga teacher trainings and immersion programs, and in 2020 he released an album of original songs inspired by yoga called Let It Open. He is currently working on a second album, and offering live kirtan events in India and the USA.
Matthew leads monthly kirtans at Sanctuary, and will be leading a Yoga Immersion and Teacher Training with his partner Corinne Andrews at Sanctuary, beginning October 2024.
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