Last week, I wrote about the last niyama which is also the third and final act of yoga: ishvara pranidhana. I translated it as surrender and suggested (a little counter-intuitively) that it was THE necessary skill for practicing accountability, which is important if we are trying to change habits.

A more complete translation of ishvara pranidhana is surrender to God. Ishvara is the word used for God, and it’s precise meaning varies in different traditions.

God means different things to different people, with lots of emotional connotations. Vimala Thakar beautifully describes ishvara as the fabric of existence. God is like the ocean and different deities or religions are like the waves on the ocean. They may look and behave very differently but they are all the same substance. In the yoga tradition, all that exists is myriad manifestations of ishvara, the underlying reality.

In other words, there is some mystery from whence we came and to which we’ll return. That’s what I mean now when I say God. I use the word God to keep the emotional connotations, but I don’t want to make assumptions about what those connotations are. They can, and should, shift as understanding develops.

I was raised in the Presbyterian Church and was very religious as a child. God was a father and Jesus was a friend. They loved me like family even when I misbehaved or fell short. Then, when I was thirteen, a pastor convinced me that I couldn’t be a Christian unless I believed literally in the virgin birth and bodily resurrection. All at once, I became a spiritual orphan.

In literature, becoming an orphan is often the beginning of a great adventure, and so it proved for me. Because I could not accept the miracles, for a long time I thought I must be an atheist.

That was stressful. How could I surrender when I was responsible for everything in my life? Yoga showed me another way to understand my place. And so I’ve worked my way back to God, no longer a guy with a beard, but once more a refuge and support. How you imagine God is a deeply personal thing, fed by family, culture, and personal needs. But to proceed in this tradition, you must imagine God. Each of us is just a thread in the fabric of something unknowable, and we are dependent on that fabric.