Unity

“Yoga is to find union - between mind and body, between the individual and her God, between the thoughts and the source of our thoughts, between teacher and student...” (121).

While Liz is in the ashram, she reflects back on her yoga training from home, producing her own definition for the importance of yoga. This idea can be looked at a few ways, which seem to differ vastly, but on second glance, maybe they are the same. First is the idea that one can find peace with herself upon retreating into herself. In this place, she may find union between herself and all of the outside sources Liz mentions. This is again, a link to transcendentalism, relying on ourselves to make peace and be happy. If someone can discover that everything she needs to be happy already exists within her, she has the ability to achieve ultimate peace and happiness with herself and the world.

This can also be looked at as the idea that God exists within all of us. Some believe that the holy spirit is a part of all of us, which would produce a sort of union between human beings and God. When looking at the pairs Liz provided, it seems that they all fit together. They seem to evolve into bigger ideas as one reads farther into the sentence, but I think it is possible that Gilbert was referring to the same thing when she made all of the pairs. She starts off with the union of mind and body, which is a union that is often discussed, a union that many people seek. The next step is between the individual and her God. What I liked most about this pair was the use of the phrase “her God.” This emphasizes the fact that not everyone believes or should believe in the same God. When compared to the first pair, we can think of this pair as a match, where the individual is the mind, in control of your will, and God is the body, residing in a piece of everyone, guiding them on their journey. The next two pairs also seemed extremely alike and they seem to go along with the first idea. Not many people ever really consider where the source of their thoughts is, but this is an important union to examine. The union between teacher and student is also interesting because it goes hand in hand with our thoughts. Some would argue that a teacher is the source of our thoughts. We all have the ability to think whatever we choose to think, but isn’t it a teacher that sparks our thinking first? Wouldn’t also be correct to assume then that a student sparks a teacher’s thinking as they uncover or bring up something the teacher overlooked? Looking back on the God and individual pair, it is unclear which person in the pair would be the teacher and which would be the student, but maybe each can be both, as in tangible life. Focusing on just our own thoughts, I think we can say that many of the more profound thoughts to come from God, or a religious figure. Others come from our peers, which if we follow this idea, have a piece of God within them. So then according to this, don’t all of our thoughts have a source with God?

Finally, as we look back on the literal idea of union between these pairs, it may all be the same thing. When one finds peace with herself, maybe that is because she has found peace with God. This is definitely an idea that makes one wonder and question everything that has always seemed so certain in life.