> have a sense that there is something valuable for me, but I want to extract it with minimal cost My gut feeling is that this won't really work. A lot of thes

> have a sense that there is something valuable for me, but I want to extract it with minimal cost My gut feeling is that this won't really work. A lot of these things need to be felt and experienced, not just learnt. There's a metaphore that no matter how much one reads about mangoes and the descriptions of their taste, you can't really know what one tastes like until you eat it. Similarly the experience of yoga or any other somewhat metaphysical thing cannot be fully conveyed textually and intellectually. On one hand this bothers me as an engineer and a logical person. But on the other hand, when hiring someone we care about years of experience not just book knowledge. This is because the experience, including weird and failure like experience is part of how a person gets "there" in their growth. I think yoga and religion is much the same, you can't truly get it until you've struggled with the intangible and illusive elements of it and attained some of the feelings. Personal background: I was every lucky to get involved with some hardcore hatha teachers and ended up doing hatha teacher training a few years ago. The course was as much about the history and philosophy and the experience of yoga as it was about praneyama and asana. Since that time, I became more connected to Judaism (I think yoga opened me up emotionally for that) and drifted further away from yoga as I think they are incompatible in some ways so I am not a great authority. But I do think "not taking the easy way" is pretty central to the whole thing.