What Is Yoga, Really?

In the West, "yoga" most often points to a posture practice — useful, sometimes beautiful, but a small subset of what the traditions mean by the word. Patañjali’s Yoga Sutras lay out eight limbs, of which posture is only one. What unifies them is union: the practitioner gradually closes the gap between thought and life, between the small self and the field in which it arises.