Thoughts on the Spiritual Quest of Yoga

Along the path of your spiritual quest, you'll face upsetting some people and be upset. There will be inevitable misunderstandings and judgments. The journey to find peace within is one laden with equal harshness and treachery as the one that is external. There's a resurfacing of an old topic recently on yoga losing its spirituality as it continues to grow as multi-billion dollar industry with "new" facets of it coming through. As yoga corrupts itself with elements of power, politics, sexual misconduct (or due to fact that social media has made it more apparent), our ability to know what yoga is, is diminished as it embroils in unrelated & uneventful theme that is brought about by the inevitable changes of the world we live in. How yoga is perceived and experienced today has changed and it is causing the disappearance of what I'd like to think as the authentic dimension of yoga. To know what yoga is, is to experience it through the physical, mental & subtle bodies. It is attainable by anyone so long as they are willing, but it requires a couple of things. One, time and effort. Two, is none other than guidance from someone who has walked the path before and gained the wisdom, with help from another who has walked that same path before him or her - a teacher; a guru. There's no other way, not from watching videos, reading all the information about it, discussions, except and only, by one's own direct and personal experience. "Yoga is 99% practice, 1% theory." My understanding for that has evolved with time. The old "theory" meant information, books, instruction, knowledge and I thought that was crucial. "Theory" now meant everything besides the actual practice of yoga itself. And more crucially, how that relates to "yoga", not as the goal-oriented cessation of thought, Samadhi, Kaivalya, much less, postures, but the sense of perception that opens to that very experience of the nature of yourself. When I say I understand something, am I referring to conceptual understanding, or the experience of the subject in question that has been formed internally? There's quite a distinct difference. For the former, expressions of "theory" are no more than a futile method for discerning yoga. It is our loss.