I sometimes struggle with stress and yoga helps but I am still new to the thought process to surrendering to yoga’s religious aspects. What are some good tips to better my connections to yoga?
Yoga is designed for the stilling of thought, according to Patanjali. Rajayoga is what Patanjali teaches and preaches. There is no religiousness required. So what do you mean by that?
I find after my yoga in the mornings I do Naam Simran (Mantra Meditation). When I do this I concentrate on my breathe and the words coming out my mouth and consciously listen to them through each breath. This makes my mind calm and concentrate on nothing else but the word and breathe. I notice the mind chatter is much less. This sets me up for the day. Also I di this around five am, I find there less distractions around that time. Hope this helps.
Good question. How do we remember that all life is Yoga. For me it takes daily reading and then I try to remember parts of what I read.
Like from Aurobindo:
In the right view both of life and of Yoga all life is either consciously or subconsciously a Yoga. For we mean by this term a methodised effort towards self-perfection by the expression of the secret potentialities latent in the being and — highest condition of victory in that effort — a union of the human individual with the universal and transcendent Existence we see partially expressed in man and in the Cosmos.
But all life, when we look behind its appearances, is a vast Yoga of Nature who attempts in the conscious and the subconscious to realise her perfection in an ever-increasing expression of her yet unrealised potentialities and to unite herself with her own divine reality.
P. 6 The Synthesis of Yoga