As a skeptic and a person that grew up this ‘scientific/technological’ age, I had been conditioned to always view spiritual things with a large bucket of salt. At the mention of anything supernatural or contradictory to scientific knowledge, my mind often puts it in the ‘Highly Unlikely to be true’ category.
Before coming to the YTT course, I always knew there were aspects of yoga that related to more than the physical asanas but never had the willpower to find out more. However, after weeks of being in discussions about chakras, auras, nadis and other spiritual ideas, I found it most useful to toy with such concepts and make full use of such knowledge rather than immediately dismiss them.
From the 8 Limbs of Yoga that contain some guides on how to lead life to the various types of yoga such as Tantric or Raja Yoga, I have found that the characterization of these domains in yoga have been misrepresented to a significant extent. And this problem is further exacerbated by the ambiguity of terms in yoga, as it seems like everyone has a different opinion on what each Sanskrit term means.
I started to realize how they can be applied to our own life, our own materialistic, hedonistic life. From starting each day with an intention to recognizing the similarities/connectedness of things we though to be distinct. By trying to apply these concepts to real life, I found them to be grounded in so much more meaning and application, rather than the baseless conjectures of ancient people high on psychedelics.
While I remain a highly skeptical person, here is a reminder to be more open minded and to make meaningful use of knowledge learnt.
