What is Hatha Yoga?

Let’s first take a look at what the words literally mean: ‘Hatha’ are two Sanskrit words fused together. ‘Ha’ means sun and refers to the solar, masculine, yang aspects of our being. ‘Tha’ means moon and refers to the lunar, feminine, yin aspects of our being. ‘Yoga’ comes from the Sanskrit root ‘Yuj’ and means ‘to join’ or ‘to unite’, referring – similar to the word ‘religion’ – to a reunion with the Supreme Consciousness, with God, or whatever name we prefer to address the source of all existence. So we could say that ‘Hatha Yoga’ means “to balance the two polarities” in our being, and in a wider sense, Hatha Yoga is “the reunion of the being with the Supreme Consciousness by harmonizing, balancing and finally transcending both polarities.”

Practiced with its real purpose, Hatha Yoga is therefore much more than stretching, and its deeply beneficial effects reach far beyond the physical body. Correctly practiced, Hatha Yoga balances our whole being in its physical, energetical, emotional, mental and spiritual dimension. We are naturally wholesome beings, with all our various inner energies, motions and emotions maintained in harmony. By ignoring or even rejecting one side of a life aspect, we become more and more unbalanced – stress, restlessness and disease follows. Through its profoundly beneficial impact on our entire being in all its dimensions, Hatha Yoga easily restores our balance, happiness and health.

Hatha Yoga mainly consists of the body postures, (asanas in Sanskrit), that could more rightfully even be named bodily attitudes. Practicing yoga poses reduced to their physical implications does not grant us the whole spectrum of their holistic benefits. To unlock the full potential of Hatha Yoga, we need to engage our full focus on the specific resonance processes triggered by each posture, therefore simultaneously adopting a specific inner attitude in our entire being.

Furthermore, the Hatha Yoga system includes many purification methods (kriyas) cleansing our physical body. They also prepare our energetic body for the advanced asanas, yogic methods and breathing techniques (pranayama).

When we practice Hatha Yoga, we profoundly harmonize our whole being. The yogis have known for thousands of years that we are made out of five different energetic layers or sheaths (koshas). The physical is just one of them. Even though Hatha Yoga starts from the physical body and breath, it gives us conscious and active access to beneficially influence all our energetic layers. This makes Hatha Yoga an invaluable methodical system that anyone can practice, starting precisely from where they are.

From Matter to Energy

Quantum science has long proven that everything is vibration. Nothing is really solid. The further down we go into the atomic and subatomic level, the more obvious it gets. The famous double-slit experiment revealed a fascinating reality: particles show the behavior of waves, entering through two neighboring slits at the same time and creating an interference pattern. Yet, the moment an observer is present, the particles display the characteristics of matter, passing through only one of the slits with clear distribution, no interference.

Translating these discoveries into our practical life, it becomes obvious that matter is simply the most condensed form of energy. Our body, or better to say our being, is a vibrating energy field, constantly embedded in the vast energies of our surroundings, our planet, our solar system, the entire universe. And we are not only embedded, but also connected to literally everything.

Consciousness has a crucial influence on energy, as the presence of the observer in the above mentioned experiment immediately influences the behavior of particles, which are after all the building blocks of our vast physical universe including our body. Our thoughts, our image about ourselves and our entire belief system are directly influencing our body, its shape, its functioning and health. Modern science has therefore reached the point of proofing exactly what yogis have discovered thousands of years ago, directly in their consciousness, through the inner science of Yoga. We are witnessing the dawn of a fusion of science and spirituality, a fusion that is at the basis of the Integral Esoteric Yoga Course already more than 30 years. Hatha Yoga remains an important tool of every genuine yogi, also for the modern “spiritual scientist”.

Our Energetic Bodies and the Chakra System

Chakras are very well known nowadays as spinning wheels of energy. We have seven chakras situated along the spine – from its base to the top of our head. The chakras are connected through energy channels (nadis). In Hindu tradition it is stated that our body consists of 72,000 such nadis which spring from three basic nadis – Ida Nadi (on the left side), Pingala Nadi (on the right side) and the central channel Sushumna Nadi.

Less known is that the chakras are also genuine centers of consciousness. Each chakra has specific tasks and qualities connected to it, governing specific areas of our human and spiritual life. The first year of our Esoteric Tantra Course starts with an in-depth journey through all the chakras, both in theory and practice. Hatha Yoga is also a fundamental aspect on the specific path of Tantra, and sessions are part of each of the weekly classes.

When a chakra is unbalanced, the blocked energies create tension, unpleasant feelings and health problems. With a regular Hatha Yoga practice such imbalances can be resolved energetically, long before they turn into a concrete health problem in the body. And even if our health is already affected, the practice of asanas offers excellent support.

Yoga students are often surprised how strong the recharging effects are felt after each Hatha Yoga session. Our muscles enjoy being stretched and strengthened, but the main cause of this recharging is the profound tuning with our subtle bodies and the rebalancing, energizing and realigning of our whole energetic structure.

The Importance of Awareness in Hatha Yoga

Asanas can be practiced for the simple purpose of stretching and strengthening the muscles, which already grants a multitude of beneficial effects. The focus can then solely rest upon the physical body. Yet the true purpose of Hatha Yoga, as described above, consists of a profound balance of all layers of our being, which requires the involvement of a focused awareness.

In Taoism it is said that “energy follows awareness, awareness follows energy”. In the frame of Hatha Yoga we can say that a body posture by itself already triggers specific resonance processes. If additionally we focus all our awareness upon the inner processes, then our thoughts, our imagination and consciousness align with the qualities, energies and states specific to that asana. This inner alignment acts like an amplifier and the effects will be multiplied to a great extent.

This is why we pay such great attention to proper awareness during the practice of asanas, but also dedicate a phase of awareness right after each execution. This helps us to crystalize and significantly deepen the effects. The teacher guides these phases and explains exactly which effects appear on the physical, psycho-mental, emotional and spiritual level. In this way Hatha Yoga becomes a safe and systematic tool that can be checked and verified through direct experience.

The Length of Executions and Sessions

Nowadays asanas are often executed very shortly, or even merged into a continuous flow without staying in one position at all. In order to fully unfold the effects of traditional Hatha Yoga, it is required to stay in each asana for longer duration. The effects grow exponentially with the duration, and it becomes possible to deeply relax into the asana and to become more aware of its effects. Awareness is amplifying the effects which in turn we become more and more aware of, closing an uplifting feedback loop between awareness and energy.

For beginners it is not always easy to stay longer in some of the postures, which is not a problem. The body gives the indication and we should never push beyond our limits. In our courses the duration of asanas starts short and extends throughout the months with growing experience of the class. Nevertheless long executions have one advantage especially for beginners to better feel the energetic and subtle effects of the practice, effects that accumulate with longer duration.

Even the purely physical effects are improving, the muscles have more time to stretch and even to enter beyond their daily tone into a deep relaxation, helping it to stretch beyond its regular limits without risk of injury. Such a deep relaxed stretching furthermore has healing effects on the fascia. The fascia is a thin tendon-like connective tissue, enclosing our muscles and organs, and its importance for our overall health has been underlined in recent years by modern medicine.

Warm-Up Exercises

We begin each Hatha Yoga session with a set of six warm-up exercises. These warm-ups are essential to ensure the right preparation of the physical body, and beyond that, also our subtle-energetic layers. We know the need to warm up our physical body from doing sports – without preliminary warming up and stretching, we could otherwise hurt our cold muscles. It is similar with the energetic layer: our nadis need to be prepared for the increased flow of energy running through our energetic system. The warm-up exercises are very powerful, and our health and life would improve tremendously even just alone from doing these exercises regularly.

Conscious Relaxation

Relaxation is our natural state. This can be easily observed in nature: nature is always relaxed. Of course, it happens that an animal is escaping a predator. But once the danger passes by, it immediately returns to a state of relaxation, it does not carry a stressful trauma – or a generalized chronically intense workload.

We human beings on the other hand are so used to constant stress and mental agitation that it is usually very difficult to let go. We assume relaxation is something that we need to achieve, while in reality it is always there. When we let go of all the overlaying accumulations caused by stress and constant thoughts, we can immediately tune into it. In this way we allow our body and mind to fall back into their natural state of relaxation.

Yet, relaxation is not just a passive abandonment – deep relaxation needs an active approach. We become aware of the stress or other factors that contract and occupy us, and take an active choice to let it go. Wherever consciousness is present, our inner energies are getting structured, realigned and clarified in our body, in our energetic layers and beyond. This makes us relaxed, calm and happy, and a feeling of oneness appears in our being. Our body responds to the presence of consciousness with deep relaxation, a depth that could not become so profound by just passively laying down or taking a nap.

This is why we practice an active conscious relaxation at the end of each session. The relaxation is also important to let the energies really sink in and get fixed in our energetic structure. In this way the energies accumulated during the asana session will be stabilized and harmoniously distributed throughout our being.

The Benefits of Hatha Yoga

The benefits of practicing in this traditional way are enormous. We can especially perceive them when we compare how we felt before and after the practice session. Most obviously we will observe the results in our body, improved flexibility and strengthening of the involved muscles. We feel energized and rested at the same time, powerful yet profoundly balanced and peaceful, refreshed, expanded and fully alive.

We will also be able to clearly perceive that the effects go far beyond the physical – our entire subtle-energetic, emotional and psycho-mental structures are dynamized and harmonized. Our chakras are activated and balanced, and all the correspondent qualities and potentials start to awaken – increased vitality and life-force, refined eroticism and social integration, strong will-power and self-confidence, empathy and capacity to love more, refinement and sublime intuitions, mental clarity and sharp intelligence, expansion of our consciousness and states of oneness. In this way we become more and more aware that we are not only our body and thoughts, but a complex multi-dimensional being with a living soul and a higher Self.

Hatha Yoga in our Live Online Courses

In order to practice Hatha Yoga in a correct and efficient way, it is needed to learn the underlying mechanisms and principles, of which we gave some examples in this article. Only when we know precisely how and what we are doing, can we consciously do it. This is why Hatha Yoga is first and foremost about awareness of the resonance processes triggered by specific bodily postures.

Hatha Yoga is certainly not a quick fix or a mere stretching exercise. It is a systematic tool to ensure reaching your goals when applied perseveringly and with enormous effects. Even just practicing once in a while, Hatha Yoga will unfold a rich variety of beneficial effects on the body and psyche. Yet, in order to truly benefit from its enormous potential, a continuous and correct practice with a very good focus and an adequate length of execution is necessary.

Hatha Yoga is for very good reasons an essential step in the 8 limbs of Yoga, laid out by the great sage Patanjali as the path towards spiritual accomplishment. Asana sessions are therefore part of all our weekly Yoga, Tantra and Meditation courses, together with a rich body of theoretical teachings. The courses gradually reveal the principles of the universe, enabling us to understand how life itself functions down to the minute details of our daily life, emotional life and professional life. In this way, the courses could be seen as a university of life, offering a path to learn everything about oneself and the mysteries of the universe.