What is yoga??

What exactly does it mean when somebody says, "well, that's not very yogic of you" or "that's not very yoga". Is there an architype that all yoga practioners are to fall into?

I may be a practitioner and I may be a teacher too but at the end of the day, I am a human being who is just as fallible as the next person.

The truth is, we all have our neurotic tendencies, our own stories and definitely our faults. All of this, can be summarized as our avidya.

Avidya is defined as our ignorance and one of the 5 kleshas or poisons of the spirit. It is all the bullshit we keep hidden and locked away in the dark recesses of the mind, the heart and the soul. We can all identify with this and there are moments in life when we're sitting right in the middle of it all and it consumes our being so much that we lose touch momentarily with the present moment. It is being human.

And no yoga practitioner will be exempt from this as it is a cycle we will rinse and repeat through over and over again. We find some pieces of ignorance in the way we are behaving, perceiving and believing and through hard work, we make it through and learn something. But then we'll find something new through an experience or interaction and it starts again.

This my friends... Is the fate of the yogi.

We will all have moments of compunction from things we say or do. But being a "yogi" is less about what has already happened and what will define your actions as "yogic" is what you will do after the fact.

Continue to learn, continue to love (especially when it's hard) and continue to laugh through it all.