By Matrika Gast

If you take yoga classes, you are a yogi. You are being educated in the science of yoga. You can count on your “yoga studies” to ensure that you are in a process of personal growth.

Search for “personal growth” on AmazonSmile and you’ll find hundreds of titles, largely focusing on cultivating career and success in the world.  A yogi’s personal growth certainly includes career and worldly pursuits. In fact, your education as a yogi makes this type of success more available to you.

But yogic education does not focus on outward achievement. When you are a yogi, your education is directed inward, an expansion on the inside. You may have started yoga because of physical or emotional pain.  While Svaroopa^® yoga poses improves your condition, rather these practices make you able to turn your awareness inward. That change in direction dissolves inner tensions that create so much of the pain in body and mind. This release allows you to grow from within as naturally as an acorn sprouts into an oak tree.

This is true education, coming from the Latin verb educere, meaning to bring forth that which is hidden. You have learned yogic practices that not only make you more effective in the world but, more importantly, open you to your own True Nature. You become more and more illuminated from the source within, the light of your own Self . When you unravel the deep layers of physical tension and mental contraction, you bloom from within in the glory of that Light.

This education transforms you inside and outside, as it brings forth that which was always there in you — but hidden. You are able to use more effectively your inborn talents as well as your life skills. Certainly, your life improves outwardly. Yet this education teaches you that you never needed to improve yourself. You find that you were always whole, you were always the eternal Divine Essence. You are able to live more and more in that inner knowing, which frees you. Yes, reliably, you become more effective in what you do in the world, yet your joy, your bliss, arises from within.