Author: yoga shobha

When I was growing up in a small town on the South Island of New Zealand we went to church on Sunday mornings. My parents were not particularly religious, but I think they wanted my brother and I to have a sense of right and wrong in our lives. They felt that the best way to instill this in us was to have a preacher inform us in no uncertain terms that if we ever did certain things or didn’t do others, then we were in trouble—BIG trouble. The morals we were taught in church were basically—do the right thing. But no one ever told me to “think the right thing”. In studying Maharishi Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras recently, I was surprised to find a similar moral code to the ones of my childhood in the form of the yamas and niyamas. There was a difference here though, in that Maharishi Patanjali presents his morals more like an intelligent choice. Adopt these morals if you want to progress spiritually. They are offered as the means to purify the seeker’s mind. An interesting distinction arose. All of a sudden I had an on-the-ground reason to adopt these morals; rather than just coming from a distant place of “should.” In eastern thought, it’s not just our actions that really count but also the intention behind the actions, including both the thinking process...