The beautiful language of Sanskrit!

When I'm not teaching or practicing yoga, I am learning and studying Sanskrit! Right now I am taking a Sanskrit class where we spend about 6 hours a week in class learning, and then we study every day practicing the sounds, writing the letters, and singing the mantras! Sanskrit is really such a beautiful language, where the vibrational sound of each word has a meaning and must be said correctly or else you are not saying the word! Unlike every other language where you can tell if someone is a native speaker of that language or if they come from a certain region by their accent when they speak, Sanskrit has no accents, every word is spoken exactly the same whether you are from India, America or Germany it does not matter, the sound will be the exact same! - The purpose of Sanskrit is to give us joy, help us find ourselves, and experience the highest truth. Just like yoga helps us to heal our bodies, Sanskrit mantras help our minds to be free! When the mind is not free it causes pain in the body, because the pain of the mind is expressed in the body. When the mind is free, even if the body is falling apart, the mind does not perceive that as pain, it merely notices it. How we perceive things is in the mind. A truly free mind will be able to see something as just a situation and stay in is happiness. This is why in Ashtanga yoga we have mantras at the beginning and end of our yoga practice, because they help the mind in the same way the yoga helps the body! The yoga poses are originally spoken in Sanskrit, because Sanskrit is also the language of yoga! So as you can see yoga and Sanskrit go very much hand in hand! I cannot tell you how great it is to have both a yoga and a Sanskrit practice in my everyday life, the benefits of both are massive!