A little exposure to the philosophy of many Eastern spiritual traditions - including yoga - could easily lead you to conclude that if you aspire to achieve goals in the material world you cannot fulfill yourself spiritually, or vice versa. However, since all of us, at some level, long for fulfillment in all aspects of our life, it is essential to understand that these two aims are not mutually exclusive.

For some people it may be kind of off-putting. But the idea that fear accompanies us at every step: the point is that our courage has to be bigger than our fear.

When it comes to desire, it's not a matter of avoiding desire, but rather learning to discern those desires that are helpful and necessary for your growth - those that serve your soul and help you continue to thrive - from those that do not.

The point of yoga is to develop a level of clarity and self-understand ing so that when we’re done doing our yoga practice we make really good decisions, because that will determine whether we’re fulfilled. Not the quality of our poses. But really the yoga is what happens when we’re done practicing yoga.

Yoga's ultimate intent is to achieve something far deeper and more meaningful than just a better body or less stress and tension. Its ultimate aim is to help you hear your soul's call so that you can be consistently guided to make the best decisions - the ones that serve your highest state of wellbeing. In the process of doing so, you will necessarily be made more whole and act in such a way as to support the larger world of which you are a part.

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.

The yoga tradition addresses how to live and how to shape your life with a commanding sense of purpose, capacity and meaning.