The yoga tradition asserts that lasting happiness is dependent on prospering both materially and spiritually.

There is this expectation that as January 1st dawns, we're going to do it differently. Moreover, there's this kind of pressure, that even if I've been trying to be different for a while, January 1st, from here on in - I have to be different. There's a cultural expectation, there's a personal expectation. I think it's worth just taking pause for a minute and talking about that.

Looking back, I see that I was born with the subtle sense that material treasures alone, no matter how grand, would never be enough to satisfy the longing in my heart to see the light, to know the truth.

Yoga’s supreme objective is to awaken an exalted state of spiritual realization, yet the tradition also teaches you how to live and how to shape your life with a commanding sense of purpose, capacity, and meaning. In the end, yoga has less to do with what you can do with your body and more to do with the happiness that unfolds from realizing your full potential.

If yoga is about life, this means ALL life, not just part of it. Together, the spiritual and the material constitute the whole you, the whole of the experience of being human, and the nature of the universe in which you live. There may be no step more important to achieving ultimate fulfillment than accepting what the Vedas teach us about desires--that some desires are inpsired by your soul.

In fact, many people, including some who practice yoga, assume that yoga is nothing more than a form of exercise, or they believe that only the physical aspects of yoga have relevance to their lives. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

It is attachment to desire, not desire itself, that is the underlying cause of practically all of our pain and suffering.