Yoga's Spiritual Path Means to Join

The yogas are active spiritual paths, a way for people to achieve illumination by the Divine Spark within us all. The word yoga literally means “union” and is related to the English words "join" and "yoke". Through yoga, we “unwrap” the Divinity within, thereby allowing our true spiritual natures to shine forth ever brighter. There are numerous types of yoga; here is a short explanation of some of the main ones:

Jnana yoga is the yoga of wisdom and true knowledge.To know Brahman as one's individual Self is Jnana. It looks into the reality about who we are and what we are experiencing and the complete comprehension of this reality carries enlightenment. According to Shankara (c.788-820), everything is fundamentally one divine reality, and despite our customary experience leads us to perceive things as being separate and different, this perception is inaccurate. The divine reality can take many shapes, so spiritual liberation was accomplished when the individual personally came to comprehend the unity of all things.

Karma Yoga is the yoga of work and service, deeds for others done in an unselfish way. Bottom line, it is concerned with helping all life forms to carry out that within them. Deeds performed without a hope for reward.

Bhakti yoga is the pure spiritual devotion. The yoga of worship of, or love for, an aspect of the Divine. It's the most common of the yogas and it's considered as the most direct approach to unite with the divine. It can contain numerous ways of displaying your devotion, most commonly chants, offering of food, fire, flowers and incense to images, as well as, every hymn, reading poems, devotionals.

Raja yoga, sometimes called the "Royal Yoga", is the yoga of meditation, of mental and psychic control....

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...ufferings and pain. It's involved with the idea of self realization. It's the notion of getting above all egotistic responses, such as resentment and anger, which limit the individual. The freer you become, the more you can observe life from a less selfish and egotistical point of view to a perspective that grasps the whole. Another way to freedom from egotism is isolating oneself from pleasure or pain. At the conclusive stage, the individual can entirely go from past the limited self, to knowing the sacred reality that everything shares, when the limitation of being an individual is gone, only Brahman remains.

Dharma is the social and spiritual duty. It stands for the basic moral balance of all things. It's played out in all areas of life: religious, social, and familial. At a social level, every individual has a particular Dharma according to their place in life.