Aug 16, 2025 5 min read Yoga

25. What Western Yoga Often Misses: 5 Deeper Dimensions to Transform Your Practice

Has yoga in the West lost its soul? Explore five powerful elements, from surrender to energy mastery, often missing in modern practice. Reconnect with yoga’s deeper roots to awaken awareness, amplify vitality, and transform both your inner and outer life.

Photo by Swastik Arora / Unsplash

First, a brief personal note, apologies for the delay in sharing my latest post. I’ve been immersed in completing my 500-hour Yoga Teacher Training programme, which I undertook to complement my meditation teaching. Now, in addition to guiding meditation, I can offer yoga as a way to prepare the body for stillness and deeper inner work.

The journey was intense, enlightening, and at times humbling. Now that I’ve emerged from the training, I want to share some of the insights I gathered, perspectives often missing from the way yoga is taught in the West.

In many Western contexts, yoga is presented primarily as a route to flexibility, strength, and stress relief. While these are valuable, they are just a fraction of yoga’s true purpose. Yoga is not merely a series of postures, but a holistic art, a science of consciousness, energy, and surrender. Without these deeper elements, the practice risks becoming just another form of exercise.

Here are five often-overlooked dimensions of yoga that can transform your practice.

1. The Art of Surrender

At the heart of yoga lies Ishvara Pranidhana, the surrender to a higher intelligence, whether you call it the divine, universal consciousness, or your own deeper self. In many Western classes, intention-setting or a brief moment of prayer may be included, but rarely is this surrender woven into the entire practice.

True surrender is not passive. It’s an active offering of your actions, breath, and awareness. When practised in every pose, it transforms yoga from a physical exercise into a spiritual dialogue.

Pro Tip: If you find it difficult to settle into a posture, silently repeat your intention or prayer. As your focus shifts towards a higher realm, the body will naturally begin to release and surrender without you forcing it.

2. The Metaphysiology of the Subtle Body

Beyond muscles and bones lies the subtle body, a network of channels (nadis), energy centres (chakras) and fields of awareness. This is not mere metaphor but an experiential reality described in yogic texts and echoed in various spiritual traditions.

Understanding this dimension allows you to see asanas not simply as stretches, but as tools for directing and refining energy flow. Without this awareness, you may be moving the body but missing the deeper current beneath the movement.

Pro Tip: Breath carries prana, the life-force energy that flows between the physical and metaphysical realms. You can experience this by practising Cat-Cow rapidly with strong, intentional breathing. Then pause, and notice the subtle body’s energy moving and expanding as your physical body remains still. Keep your eyes closed to heighten the sensation. This practice can help you sense the movement of life itself, beyond the body, and appreciate the true significance of breath in yoga.

3. Electromagnetism in Movement

In #2, we explored how breath carries prana between the physical and metaphysical realms. Now, take that understanding further by imagining your body as a magnet and the energy field around you as a coil. Each movement, twist, and rotation works like turning a magnet within that coil, generating and pulsing an electromagnetic field.

Many ancient postures were intentionally designed with this in mind. The combination of movement and breath not only shifts energy within the subtle body but also radiates it outward, influencing the field around you. When you add clear intention to this process, you begin to touch on the deeper yogic arts of manifestation, subtly shaping your inner and outer reality through conscious movement.

Pro Tip: Visualise a life where you feel safe, free, and fulfilled, or whatever you most deeply desire. As you move through twists, rotations, or flowing sequences, hold the intention that your body is sending pulses of energy outward, generating a powerful electromagnetic field charged with pure intention, influencing the world and reality around you.

4. The Interplay of the Physical and the Metaphysical

In #3, we explored how movement and intention can project energy outward, influencing the world and reality around you. The reverse is also true: you can draw energy inward, integrating higher vibrations into your physical and subtle bodies.

In yogic philosophy, the physical and spiritual are not separate realms, they are intertwined expressions of the same truth. Neither the physical body nor the subtle body is the true self; both are guided by consciousness, the seer behind all experiences.

Yoga invites us to witness this dance between the physical and metaphysical. As you practise, observe how the physical posture influences the subtle, and how subtle shifts in awareness transform the physical. When you open yourself to receiving energy from beyond, your practice becomes a living exchange, a flow of giving and receiving between yourself and the greater universe.

Pro Tip: Visualise drawing in energy from a higher source, perhaps the wisdom of a lost loved one or the courage of a role model you admire. As you breathe and move, imagine their presence entering your heart, charging your entire being from within. Let this energy infuse your physical body and subtle body, uniting them in strength, clarity, and purpose.

5. Yoga as the Science of Energy Manipulation

In its essence, yoga is a precise method for working with energy. Postures, breath control (pranayama), and meditation are tools for cultivating, directing, and harmonising this energy. Every posture, pace, and breath pattern creates a specific state of mind and being. From strength and courage to transcendence and enlightenment, each state is simply the outcome of a balanced formula.

When reduced to a fitness regime, yoga loses much of its transformative power. But when approached as an energetic science, it becomes a pathway to expanded awareness, vitality, and inner freedom.

Pro Tip: During your yoga practice, when you encounter a state of being that truly resonates with you, a place where you feel you belong, take note of the exact posture, breath, and even the environment you are in and how you arrived at this moment. Yoga is a science, and these states and frequencies can be recreated with precision. Much like tuning into your favourite radio station!

Western yoga has made the practice accessible to millions, which is a gift. But accessibility should not come at the expense of depth. By reintroducing surrender, subtle body awareness, energetic principles, and the interplay between body and consciousness, we can restore yoga to its original purpose, not just to strengthen the body, but to awaken the self.

Since completing my 500-hour yoga training, I’ve also been reshaping my focus towards meditation for autism. I have now qualified in TQUK Level 2 Certificate in Understanding Autism (RQF) and am currently working towards Level 3. Alongside this, I am launching a preliminary study to explore how meditation techniques can support individuals on the autism spectrum. If this interests you, or anyone you know, please visit the Autism Study page on Meditation by Talwinder to learn more and see how you can get involved.

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Please note: Esoteric concepts are not meant to be taken literally or as absolute truths. However, they can provide valuable perspectives and context, helping our limited human minds grasp complex ideas.