The Yoga Sutras (Part 1) ~ The Big Idea: Learn Yoga Philosophy with Rachel 

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Awesome Isabelle! Nice to connect with you here and congrats on your YTT!

Yay!! My pleasure ~ I agree, I love how they are SO relevant to daily life and the ongoing act of managing our crazy brains!

Great to have you here Anat!

Hahaha hamsters begone! 😆😁💗

I’m so glad Sophie, nice to connect here 😄

De nada Judith!! :) 💛

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Glad to connect with you here, Jen :)

YAY! Perfect timing!!

That’s great to hear Matthew ~ glad this hit the right note! Nice to connect with you here 👍🏻

Thanks Michael! Good to have you here.

✨🙏🏻I’m glad it was useful!!

Congrats on doing your YTT!! Glad that this channel can be a resource for you 🙏🏻🙏🏻

They are definitely from the same wellspring of philosophical thought! 💛

buddhism, jainism, and yoga were all part of the same indian milieu i think. same period i think.

Thank you! I've been on a bit of hiatus because of the Nerve Tour, but there will be more to come ;)

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Thanks Nick! 🤗🙏🏻

🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻my pleasure Steve!

I am so glad that these videos are helpful to you on your yoga journey😄awesome to connect with you!

If you wanna learn yoga, you better learn atleast little bit of Sanskrit but TBH, English language sucks, it lacks vocabulary, wayyy too much. English have only 26 alphabets and lack many sounds because sanskrit has 108 billion words in vocabulary...like e.g. "ट" and "त" but you have only one sound which is "t" which makes it more difficult because the thing like accent doesn't exist when it comes to sanskrit. It's either right way or wrong way. It's mantras. That's why foreigners comes to Indian instructor because foreign instructor always mess up the pronunciation.

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Great point - there is an intention to the words used and the vibration ~ I wish I were more of a Sanskrit scholar to more accurately relay what the words/ sound imported. I would refer anyone interested to Christopher Hareesh Wallis or Carlos Pomeda who are scholar /practitioners with more understanding of this element :)

Excellent! Thank you for the reference 🙌🏻🙏🏻

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I will add to description now, you can check out :)

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Not to my knowledge ~ just a meditation seat ~ 🧘

Excellent question! CE means common era, and BCE means before common era.

Yah, definitely older than 2,000 years ~ from what my scholar sources tell me, it was not so much a Vedic tradition as a shramanic traditions, and has closer ties to the ascetic practices of the Upanishads, so they place it more around 3,000 years old than, say, 5,000 ~ But it depends who you listen to! Thanks for mentioning this ~ it's certainly interesting to see what they continue to uncover about the tradition.

@@RachelScottYoga wow! You are very knowledgeable about this subject. 😊

@@roops2939 HA!I just have smart teachers ;)

No yoga is purely Vedic concept please read rigveda first mention of om is in rigveda and secondly yoga meaning is described in upnisad and Vedas not in any shramic tradition​@@RachelScottYoga

@@Chanakya2 Hello! Yes! OM is in the rgveda ~ As I understand, more as a sense of "So Be It!" rather than with the complexity of understanding developed later in the Mandukya Upanishad. And yes - yoga is certainly in the Upanishads! The clarification here is that the scholars I have studied indicate the INSPIRATION for the new paradigm and focus on meditation that we find in the Upanishads (which then became a part of the Vedas) were almost certainly sourced from shramanic traditions rather than existing Vedic work. Thank you for commenting!

Hi there - yes, it's a widespread inaccurate habit for sure. (After 20 years teaching, I'm just starting to learn more about Sanskrit pronunciation and beginning to learn how inaccurate my pronunciation is!!! 😅😳 Yikes! I am keen to do my best to improve this for future!) It's an excellent question: why did the default over here somehow include that extra syllable? I don't know! Perhaps the golden lining there is that westerners are trying to use the original words (even through we're pronouncing them incorrectly) rather than just translate them into an English substitute. I think that's at least the right step...but hopefully over time, we can get the pronunciation a little more aligned!

Beautiful~ thank you for sharing this ~

You're right! The mind does do better when it has something to latch onto. (One of the reasons why meditating with an object to focus on...like a mantra, candle, visualization...is helpful. It gives your mind something to do.) Here's the downside of not meditating. An untrained mind will drag you all over the place. It is like a puppy, constantly bringing you toys, running after squirrels. In this case, the toys and squirrels are memories, imaginings, associations. It takes YOU on a joy ride. (When you start thinking about something and suddenly you're in tears remembering how you were a bad friend two years ago and thinking you're a bad person, for example.) This is not reality. This is a puppy joy ride. This is a series of neurological associations that just ran on autopilot. The purpose of meditation is to give you back both perspective and (if we're lucky) a modicum of control over your puppy so that instead of running all over the place it can serve you. The "you" that is not just a produce of your conditioning and experience, but the YOU that is at the center of the experience. You don't need to erase fluctuations...just develop the capacity and perspective to not be a slave to them. Do you have that now? If so, then perhaps you don't need to meditate! But if not...here are some reasons to stick with it. Will meditation reduce your stress and anxiety? Yes. Will it give you an enhanced sense of connection and aliveness? Yes. Will it give you a center in yourself to hold onto when your life goes to shit? Yes. Will it bore your mind? Yes, absolutely. But once your puppy is trained, it will be so very happy to play with you and be of service. Now, all that said, maybe you need some meditations that hold your attention better? Guided meditations, meditations with music, meditations with visualizations...? Does that help?

Hi Juan! I am not sure what you mean by "normally," I assure you this is quite normal for me, though I surely do appreciate concern over my posture. There is also no need to SHOUT in all caps and with exclamation points, I'd prefer that we keep communication on my channel kind and beneficial when possible.

HA! We do live in a wild and interconnected world these days! There is so, so much that I have yet to learn and understand ~ and frankly there is a lot that I can't understand as well because it's not my native culture, though I admire and respect this tradition enormously and will try my best. It is with great humility I offer this information in the hopes that it can be of service 🙏

@@RachelScottYoga yeh I appreciate that 😊 and even I see soo soo many things which are popular here in India and thousands of years old people all over the world following like Ayurved .,,. meditation,, yog saadhna, and many mantar like ooommm, like there are many things which originated here and people have recorded them for amazing thousands of years and many foreigners are learning it and following and embracing it. Ours are crazy about western culture 🙄

He was a remarkable human.

@@RachelScottYoga I'm just starting your videos. I'm not sure if they'll lead where I'm hoping, but I'm gonna watch. I like that you are a native English speaker. There are many videos on the sutras, but I have a hard time understanding what the people say. I've never been amazing at understanding other accents. Scottish accents are also difficult for me. There's a lot of discussion on the 8 limbs as an overview. I've gathered from the few other videos I've seen that most of the limbs are restraints like don't steal etc However, the part I guess, that interests me are the actually yoga positions in the sutras. What's are they? How many are there? How does it help you control the mind? What do you do if you aren't physically capable of putting yourself in certain positions? I almost died a little over a year ago. Sometimes I wish I had. The result of almost dying is endless anxiety. Most of the time I can control it, manage it to a degree. But especially when I drive, my palms start sweating, my breathing becomes strained and forced, my mind becomes exhausted from the mental effort it involves being this anxious for hours. I have tried breathing deeply and controlling my breath, but it doesn't seem to work. I'm on 2 anxiety medications and I still can't trust that when I go to drive that I'm not gonna fall apart. I just need some peace.

@@samhowl1152 hi Sam. There are no yoga positions in the yoga sutras. It is almost entirely on meditation. The only thing that it says is that your meditation pose should be comfortable and steady.

@@RachelScottYoga well that's disappointing.

@@samhowl1152 Yoga for Emotional Trauma by Mary NurrieStearns, Rick NurrieStearns

Hi Aaron, I am not sure what you mean. I don't believe more specific postural yoga was introduced til around the era of hatha - though of course as we know, practices may have been done much in advance of when they were recorded! Like the hatha ascetic practices and posture holdings. If you have alternative information - for example, when you say martial arts, I welcome you to share some of your resources so that we can all look into this.Thanks!

@@RachelScottYoga there are painted pictures, from before the time of Christ, of people in yoga poses, in a series of poses. I’m pretty sure the beginning the “Classical” yoga period was almost 3000 years ago. And What poses did “Hatha” yoga invent? What new breathing did it create? Did it show us the real right way to single minded focus?

@@aaronmurphy7967 Hi Aaron! That's interesting, I know that there are yoga looking like postures in the seals from the Indus Valley River civlization, but perhaps not enough contenxt to say "that's yoga." As Carlos Pomeda says, that could be a guy sitting on the ground! If you have a link to this reference, share it! My understanding is that that hatha yoga (500-1300) built on practices that had been happening in the ascetic communities and expanded upon them. (I would refer anyone interested to James Mallison, who is a hatha yoga scholar!) It's not that these postures (for example, being upside down) were unheard of, but that they became expanded upon as well as came out of secrecy and were intended for a wider audience. I suppose if we're discussing the Yoga Tradition, one of the questions is what do we define a tradition as? Isolated groups doing some practices doesn't quite get there, but when it becomes part of the cultural and social (or sometimes antisocial!) fabric, then we go, ah, there's a tipping point there where a set of practice have become recognizable and codified and part of the "tradition." With yoga, it's not just the shapes (as I'm sure you know!) but it's meditative or transformational intent! Thank you for sharing and if you have any references, send them~! :)

I see now. Thank you for your attempt at monetizing spirituality. You spread your hatha, like religion. Your way is way. It causes separation. You are not preparing the way, you are ushering people through a door.

@@aaronmurphy7967 Aaron, I see that you are passionately in defense of a point of view that feels important to you, and I want to acknowledge your strong feelings. But I am also disappointed that you feel the need to dismiss me as a monetizer of spirituality - though this RU-vid channel is, well, clearly free - because I disagree with you on historical scholarship. It seems like an unnecessary attack. There is no "my hatha" over here, and I claim "no way." What I have shared is a point of view on timelines based on what I have learned from western academics ~ but that kind of scholarship is clearly not the only way to understand the yoga lineage. However, it's what I have learned, so it's the seat from which I am able to share. I wish you well!

Hi there! I usually (but not always) do an intro at the beginning that is like a primer for what's to come in the video, then get into the content. If you like, you can also always fast forward any of those sections vids or listen on double speed, etc.til you get to what you are really interested in. But it also just may not be to your taste. Thanks for trying it out!