First Word, Best Word

Atha Yoga Anusasanam || "Now is the focus of Yoga." (Patanjali Yoga Sutras 1:1)

Namaste and welcome to Swadhyaya ~ the daily blog of Shruti Institute for Vedic Arts!

My focus for the blog is to provide you with daily nourishment for your own self-inquiry into Yoga's profound knowledge. It is also to serve as a supplement to our "Sanskrit for Yogis" self-study course. (For more info, see www.SanskritforYogis.com) And it's portal into the life and adventures of a Yogini and teacher, Katyayani.

Sanskrit is not an ordinary language, like English or French. It is, rather, a technology for purifying and elevating human consciousness. For example, the "Yoga Sutras of Patanjali" are each a technique, which through a highly refined mechanics of sound, convey the practice and wisdom of knowledge on a cellular bodily level.

The most fundamental and important technique of Sanskrit is the first word of any sacred scripture. The first word is the best word because it contains all the power and meaning of the entire body of knowlege. (The first letter even has the most transformative power and the contains the full shakti of the whole.)

Let's look at the first word of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras -- "atha." "Atha" contains two parts: "a" and "tha" (not "tha" as in "thank you" but "tha" as in boaTHouse). "A" means nothing, minus, negation, the void. And "tha" means solid, gravity, the earth. So together, "a-tha" means "not solid," "not gravity," or better "not bound." Free.

Conventionally, translators describe the meaning of "atha" as "now." But when we go into the parts of the word, feel them, and understand the many ways we could describe this word -- it becomes a meditation.

To be really free is to be unbound. And the only suitable way to render this state in English is with the word "now."

"Now is the focus of Yoga."

Each one of Patanjali's Sutras evolves out of the primal experience of "a," which is the Void, and each Sutra returns the Yogi who is bound by "tha" back to the primal, liberated state. Now.

"Atha" can also be used as a Mantra -- or a repetitive thought in the mind to establish that state on the most subtle level. And eventually the body starts to feel the blissful state of Now, as we become what we think.

More later...