What are Yantras? Living a Symbolic Life Part 1

 

A man’s most vital need is to discover his own reality through the cultivation of a symbolic life. But we have no symbolic life. Have you got a corner somewhere that you perform the rites as you see in India? - Carl Jung

How can a picture of something help me in my yoga practice? help me live a more complete and peaceful life? Good question.

When I first started selling shirts (by accident) I often thought to myself why the hell am I doing this? I don’t even care about clothes. I had an internal struggle with selling clothes in that I felt more like a businessman and less like a teacher. Turns out I wasn't selling clothes after all. I was teaching about Symbols.

Symbols are like yoga in alot of different ways but one is that you don't need to know how it works in order for them to have an affect on you. 

In the same way that yoga is not for exercise but gets mistaken for it because it might look like that a symbol is not a sign or a picture. Symbols have a deeper meaning that first meets the eye. 

 

What is a Yantra? Westerner Translation.

As often happens when I hear the sanskrit name of something I need to put it into western terms so I can understand it. In this post I will use all the english terms rather than the sanskrit to keep it simple. At the end I will put the sanskrit terms if you want learn more.
We need more than one English word to encompass the full meaning of the Sanskrit term and Yantra is no different. At it’s very basic definition it means instrument or tool but as I will show you it goes much much deeper than that and this is where it will aid you in your yoga practice.
A Yantra is a symbol, one of the most powerful symbols there is, and this is much different than a sign.