Most people decide the course of their life according to the needs of their bodies, which essentially means they have not learnt how to use the body. The body is using them up. This life is not here to serve the body. The body is here to serve this life. If this is forgotten, we will live like any other creature.
Is anything wrong with the other creatures? Not at all, they are wonderful. The only thing is they have come with certain limitations, and there is nothing within them that longs to transcend these limitations. If their limited needs are fulfilled, they are quite okay. But once you come with a human form, you come with a problem—if we satisfy all your physical needs, still, you will long for something more. The choice that you have is to find conscious or unconscious expression to this. When this longing finds unconscious expression, it gets labelled materialism. When it finds conscious expression, it is a spiritual process.
A human being is capable of looking at life and handling life beyond his or her survival needs. Unfortunately, today, instead of looking beyond the needs of survival, most human beings are raising their standards of survival. From two meals a day, they have raised the bar of survival to a BMW! This is not an intelligent way of using the human mechanism.
The human body is the most phenomenal gadget on the planet. If you want to explore this in one lifetime, it will take a lot. And if you do not keep the body the way it should be kept, it will become an obstacle in your life, standing like a wall. But if you keep it in a certain way, it becomes a stepping stone for a bigger possibility. Hatha Yoga is about keeping the body in such a way that it is always there for you, doing what you want it to do, not something else. Just imagine if your car started only when it felt like it. This is not a car worth having. It must start when you want it, only then can it be a device that will take you places. Otherwise, you must enjoy the parking lot. That’s a nice place too. The seasons change, sunrise and sunset happen. The only problem is you don’t go anywhere. It is the same with your life. If it doesn’t start and move anywhere, it is pretty safe but life doesn’t happen to you.
So, whether it is your ability to create the experience of your life or something larger in the world, for both these things, the first necessity is that your body takes instructions from you. If your body does not do what you want, no body will do what you want! Only when your body does what you want can you expect somebody to do what you want.
People’s identification with the body is such that they see this as “myself”. The moment you see this body as “me”, you cannot use it as an instrument. However, if you create a distance between you and the body, you will have the joy of knowing what this instrument is capable of. Hatha Yoga has ingredients in it that will slowly wear the boundaries of your individuality thin. And when the time comes, it opens up.
Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and bestselling author. He was conferred the Padma Vibhushan in 2017. Isha.sadhguru.org