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There are countless aspects of yoga that you learn on the mat, including how to adjust your alignment, quiet your thoughts, and silence your ego. Although perhaps the most elusive lesson is how, exactly, to bring the life-changing teachings of the practice into everyday life. Teacher Susanna Barkataki has dedicated her latest book to the topic, sharing insights as well as examples that help bring the ancient tradition into contemporary existence. Following is an excerpt from her chapter on “Yoga as Spiritual Practice.” —YJ Editors
The wise one beholds all beings in the Self and the Self in
all beings; for that reason he uplifts all.
—Isha Upanishad
Yoga isn’t yoga until it’s personal, until you take the teachings into your heart and make them your own. Yoga becomes a spiritual practice when you allow it to move through you, when you can breathe into it, feel, hear, taste, and touch its presence. Yoga helps us to know ourselves intimately, a crucial first step in knowing how to be in relationship with others. This journey inward begins in the body and invites us to peel back the layers to discover the secrets that lie within.
The challenge for many practitioners in the West is that their yoga practice stops with the physical body. Instead of being just one aspect of yoga, asana has been misrepresented as synonymous with fitness and outward appearances in the West for close to eighty years, giving it a position of outsized importance.
Many of us have worked hard to put asana in its place within the larger context of spiritual inquiry. As a result, more and more teacher-training programs, workshops, and retreats include the other seven limbs, as well as spiritual texts and deeper practices. All of this is good!
Yet over the years I’ve noticed something interesting. Too often folks intent on developing a spiritual practice don’t see asana as part of that. It becomes something separate—something they do to strengthen their body, gain flexibility, relieve their sciatica, or cure their anxiety. But here’s what I know: asana is and should be an integral part of the sadhaka’s journey. It is a spiritual practice itself; an act of devotion to the divine essence within us. A full-body mudra practice. A way of caring for and honoring our physical container.
There is no specific sequence to memorize, equipment to purchase, or number of hours to devote. But there is something magical and powerful that happens when we realize that practice on our mat can feed and sustain our practice off the mat too. Committing to yoga as a spiritual practice, as your personal sadhana, begins by making yoga your own, by preserving the tenets of this ancient practice in a way that speaks to you.
For many in my family, we learned yoga as a way of life long before we learned to move our bodies into a sequence of shapes and postures. It’s the way we live, something interwoven into the fabric of daily existence. It’s what and how we eat, where we shop, how we handle conflict, and who we seek out for support. It’s how we find calm and ease, how we worship, and how we express and feel inspiration.
My aita (grandmother) Lakshmi Devi Barkataki embodied yoga in so many ways. She was, in turns, funny, serious, and strongly superstitious. She married and became a mother at age thirteen. Though she had many challenges and few material possessions, she was incredibly generous. She embodied seva, the yogic principle of selfless service. My father tells of growing up in their mud-walled home in Dibrugarh, Assam, and how everyone in the neighborhood knew his mother. She and her husband, Krishna Chandra Barkataki, were always quick to share what they had with anyone, regardless of caste or class, inviting those less fortunate to stay in their home and receive care and sustenance. Their practice of yoga was not something that they did only for an hour a day. It was their sadhana. Although they practiced puja and worshipped at certain times, yoga infused every moment of the waking day. It is who they are and what they do in the world.
Yoga is a living practice accessible to all of us. It yokes the ancient teachings to our modern lives, allowing us to lean back on authentic yoga culture as a vessel for shaping change in the present. It invites us to lean into its roots as we practice forward, choosing an authentic, embodied yoga that centers equity and spiritual fulfillment.
When you are confronted with challenges or you don’t know which direction to go, yoga shines a light as you fumble around in the dark. Every few feet you move, you see a little clearer. Keep going, committed to your own unfolding. And always remember that the vehicle of yogic consciousness moves in us and through us to be shared with all beings.
As I’ve practiced, listened, and learned, I’ve felt that yoga is its own conscious being. It doesn’t care what color you are, what culture you’re from, what religion you affiliate with. It doesn’t matter if you practice at a high-end resort, in a small apartment, or a tent high up in the Himalayas. Yoga just wants you to be in integrity and use it as it is intended: to yoke, to build bridges, and to dissolve separations within and without.
You’ve perhaps heard tales of a hero or heroine’s journey, which is most often an epic external adventure. The mythologist and storyteller Joseph Campbell explores this framework in his work on the hero’s journey in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The sadhaka embarks on an internal journey of personal transformation no less epic—an interplay between the self and other; a journey of interconnected transformation.
Sadhakas are no longer dependent on the outside world for power or courage. They have awakened Shakti, the power that comes from within. Dwelling in a state of complete liberation, independence, and joy, they strive to make the world a better place for all beings. The journey begins internally and becomes external, and then there’s no distinction between the two as we embody the unity and interconnection that yoga offers.
So what does it mean to commit to yoga as your personal sadhana, as something you can bring into your daily life? I believe it means to approach every moment as sacred; to set our sankalpa—a heart-felt, personal vow—“to manifest our deepest resolve to focus and act according to our physical, mental, emotional, and pranic capacity.”
In other words, to become an agent of spiritual possibility.
From Ignite Your Yoga: How to Live, Practice, and Teach as an Authentic Yoga Steward by Susanna Barkataki. © 2025 by Susanna Barkataki. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.
