As a teenager, I remember asking myself one simple question: Who am I? I did not know then that this question would stay with me for so many years. Life happened, as it does, and somewhere along the way the question faded into the background. It was not answered. I simply stopped asking.
My relationship with yoga began in 2008. I did not begin with the intention of studying myself or finding answers to philosophical questions. I simply practiced because I fell in love with Surya namaskars and I kept returning to the same practice, again and again. A few years later, around 2012, I began journaling. I started writing about what I was noticing in my body, my thoughts, my emotions, my reactions, my habits, and the ways I was changing. Without really planning it, I had begun to study myself. Only much later did I understand that this was svādhyāya, self study,
one of the eight limbs of yoga. It is interesting how life sometimes gives us the experience before it gives us the words for it.
Years later, I began reading the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali more closely. I am currently reading Swami Satchidananda’s translation. What strikes me is how differently the same sutra can feel when we meet it at different points in our lives. The words have not changed, but my interpretation has. This may be bacuse I have changed. It is much like living with someone for many years. We may think we know our partner, our children, or even ourselves. Then one day, something they say or do reveals a side we had never noticed before. They have not necessarily changed. Perhaps we have simply become ready to see something that was there all along. I think practice is like that.
We return to the same posture, the same breath, the same meditation, perhaps even the same question, yet we are never quite the same person returning to it. Sometimes what appears to be a monotonous practice is exactly what allows us to see the patterns that usually go unnoticed. We begin to notice how we think, how we speak, how we react, what we avoid, what we hold onto, and what we do without even questioning it. These patterns are what yoga calls samskāras, the impressions and tendencies that shape the way we experience and respond to life. Practice gives us the opportunity to see them. Once we begin to see a pattern, something interesting happens. We are no longer completely inside it. There is a little space between the pattern and the person watching it. Maybe that space is where change begins.
We may respond differently. We may pause before speaking. We may notice an old reaction without automatically following it. Slowly, a familiar way of thinking or acting can begin to loosen, and something new becomes possible. This is one of the reasons I have come to think of practice as knowledge.
Knowledge today is often associated with information. Information is everywhere. We can read about almost anything, search for an answer, listen to a lecture, or ask AI within seconds. But knowing something intellectually and knowing it through experience are not the same. We can know that yoga is good for us. That is information. We can step onto the mat after a difficult day, breathe, move, become quieter, and actually feel the difference. That is lived knowledge. We can read about the breath, but sitting quietly and noticing our breath teaches us something
words cannot fully capture. We can read about the mind, but watching our thoughts change from one moment to the next is another kind of knowing.
Practice turns information into experience, and experience gives us something to observe. Observation leads to self study. Self study creates questions, and questions bring us back to practice. The circle continues. This is what I find so beautiful about svādhyāya. It is not simply about reading a book and collecting ideas. Reading can begin the inquiry, but practice gives those ideas somewhere to live. The practice of Yoga does not stop on the mat, it carries through our day where we notice, question, observe in a way of becoming almost like a witness to ourselves.
Sometimes I read something in an ancient text and recognize an experience I have already had. A teaching gives language to something I had felt but could not explain. At other times, I read something that I do not understand at all, and I am beginning to appreciate that too. Not everything needs to make sense immediately. Perhaps some teachings need to be lived before they can be understood. That is where curiosity becomes important. Curiosity keeps the door open. It allows us to say, I do not understand this yet, but I want to keep looking.
I think this is also where spirituality enters the practice for me. At some point, practice becomes more than something we do for the body or even the mind. It becomes a relationship with the unknown. We continue without always knowing exactly where the practice is taking us. That continued practice becomes sādhanā. Sādhanā, for me, is not simply a particular technique or a certain number of minutes on a mat. It is the devotion to returning. It is the willingness to stay with the practice long enough for it to reveal something.
In that sense, even an ordinary practice can become spiritual. Just as we return to prayer, we return to the mat. We offer our attention. We show up. We listen. We observe. We allow the practice to teach us. Perhaps this is why discipline alone is not enough to sustain a practice for many years. Discipline can get us started, but something deeper keeps us returning. There has to be curiosity. There has to be trust. There has to be some willingness to stay with the mystery. That mystery is important to me. We live in a world that wants to explain everything quickly. We
want to know what something will do, how long it will take, and what result we should expect. But yoga does not always work that way. Sometimes the practice gives us an answer. Sometimes it gives us another question. Sometimes we discover something about ourselves that we were not looking for at all. And sometimes nothing seems to happen. Yet even that becomes part of the practice.
Years pass, and we begin to see that the same questions return in different forms. The same patterns appear in different situations. The same samskāras show themselves in our practice, our work, our relationships, and our everyday lives. Then we notice them. We become curious about them. We study them. We read something that gives us another perspective. We return to the practice and see something differently. That new understanding changes the way we experience the next moment, and the cycle begins again.
This is why I have become less interested in the idea that knowledge means knowing
everything. I am more interested in learning how to look. Reading matters to me. Ancient texts matter to me. They carry the observations of people who spent generations asking questions about consciousness, suffering, attention, identity, and the nature of being. But reading alone is not enough. The words become meaningful when they meet our own lives.
A sutra may sit quietly on a page for hundreds or thousands of years, and yet when we encounter it through our own experience, it can suddenly feel alive. The text has not changed. We have. Perhaps that is why the same teaching can meet us differently at different times in our lives. We are always arriving with new experiences, and those experiences become the lens through which we read. Then what we read influences what we notice. What we notice changes how we practice. What we practice changes how we experience life. And life brings us back to
the questions.
It is all connected. The practice on the mat begins to appear in the way we speak. The way we breathe begins to influence the way we respond. The way we observe ourselves begins to change the way we see others. We begin to recognize our patterns not only during asana, but while sitting at the dinner table, having a difficult conversation, raising our children, working, waiting, listening, or simply being alone. Yoga slowly moves beyond the mat. Perhaps that is when practice becomes a way of living. And perhaps that is also when practice becomes knowledge. Not knowledge that can always be explained, but knowledge that can be felt. Knowledge that changes us. Knowledge that asks us to look again.
I still return to the question I asked as a teenager: Who am I? I do not think I need to rush toward a final answer. Maybe the question itself is part of the practice. Maybe curiosity keeps us searching, practice keeps us grounded, svādhyāya keeps us looking inward, ancient teachings give us new ways to see, and sādhanā gives us the willingness to keep returning. The samskāras become visible. The patterns begin to loosen. New ways of seeing emerge. We practice, read, question and discover again.
For me, practice is knowledge. Not knowledge as something collected, but knowledge as something lived. Is yoga a way to practice how to live life? And is that question interlinked with Who Am I? Let the practice reveal.