Acharya Prashant explains that you have gone and sat somewhere, and the place where you have sat is not your home. On the seat where you are sitting, you do not find peace and comfort; instead, you are getting frustration and restlessness. You are surprised. There are thousands of places to sit, but home is only one, and there are numerous distractions. Anyone can go and sit anywhere; nature is infinite, and every unit of nature is an attraction in itself. You can get attached to a leaf, a finger, a thought, a person, or an object. And how many objects are there? Infinite. How many thoughts are there? Infinite. How many people are there? How many situations? How many moments? It is certain that you have become homeless, you have left your home. To bring you back home is Yoga. To reconnect you with your home is Yoga. Yoga means to join. Joining whom with whom? Joining the one who is separated with their home. To join the estranged, deviated, and distracted consciousness with the Self is Yoga. Now, the one who needs to be joined must first find out where their consciousness has run off to. And according to the place where it has gone and sat, some remedy will have to be prescribed to bring it back. If someone has climbed a tree, what will they be told? 'Come down.' So this becomes a method of Yoga: to come down. This method applies to the one who has become attached to a tree, a part of nature. If someone has an attachment to a river, they will be told to come out and dry their body. This becomes a method of Yoga. If someone is attached to a person, they will be told to practice detachment. So, detachment becomes a method of Yoga. If someone is filled with anger and has left home to find their enemy in the world, they are driven by hatred. They will be told to renounce their hatred. So, renunciation becomes a method of Yoga. Yoga is the end; it is the name for bringing the homeless back home. And the homeless can be found anywhere; there are infinite possibilities. Who knows where the mind has gone? As Kabir Saheb said, 'The mind became a bird and flew to the sky, but it fell from above, near Maya.' The impure consciousness calls wandering here and there, away from home, by the name of freedom. That is why a person likes to become homeless from home. They don't say, 'I am becoming homeless'; they say, 'I am becoming free.' But that freedom is very costly because it is not freedom at all. Now, you will understand what Hatha Yoga and Raja Yoga are, and why there are so many methods of Yoga. The end of Yoga is union—joining the strayed being with their home. For the one who is attached to the body, what needs to be done? They need to be freed from the body. And who is most attached to the body? The one who is sick. So, Hatha Yoga is the name for detaching you from the body. Hatha Yoga is for the exercise of the body. And Raja Yoga is the spirituality for the mind. Hatha Yoga is necessary because most people's attachment is not to ideologies or beliefs, but only to the body. Hatha Yoga is necessary so that your relationship with your body becomes a little healthy. When your relationship with the body becomes healthy, you will not have that attachment to objects that you often have. This body is a great obstacle. Look at how much your body moves and fidgets. To listen, you need a body that is completely still, that hasn't touched or held anything. But here, the eyes are used to looking around, the hands are used to touching the person next to you, and the legs are used to kicking them. The body has accepted trembling as its nature. So, Hatha Yoga is necessary so that you can learn to sit. Hatha Yoga is necessary so that when you sit cross-legged, your knees don't give up. And when your gross desires, which are related to the body, start to diminish, then comes Raja Yoga.
