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The History of Yoga
While most people are familiar with yoga's physical postures, few know that yoga was actually started as a spiritual practice that had little to do with contorting one's body into difficult poses.
The History of Yoga: From Enlightenment to Exercise
The history of yoga has become somewhat construed in today's society based on current trends of using yoga as a fitness method. When people mention yoga today, they typically describe the physical postures used to develop strength, flexibility, and stamina. However, modern yoga's spotlight on physical fitness is quite different from the very first forms of yoga, which primarily developed one's inner spirit. In fact, if an ancient yoga practitioner were to sit in on a modern yoga class, he'd probably have no idea what the class was doing.
Yoga's Spiritual Roots
In the beginning, yoga had very little to do with the physical postures, known as asanas. Yoga began as a set of oral teachings on spirituality more than 5,000 years ago in India. These teachings—made up of chants, poems, and stories—were passed down through generations and were designed to help one achieve spiritual enlightenment.
Because nothing was written down, it's difficult to know the exact content of the original yoga teachings and the history of yoga. But in the second century, these age-old lessons were organized into a text called "The Yoga Sutra," written by an Indian sage named Patanjali. Patanjali's book is made up of 196 short verses, called sutras.
The sutras prescribed specific methods for purifying how one thinks and acts, which were designed to quiet the mind, control the senses, and ultimately develop pure awareness, or enlightenment. The premise behind the practices was that by controlling and balancing the mental and physical sensations you experience, you can avoid suffering and live a more meaningful life.
Eight Steps to Heaven
No history of yoga exploration is complete without these eights steps. The sutras laid out a system for living called ashtanga, which is made up of eight holistic steps. The eight steps include moral discipline, self-restraint, posture, breath regulation, sensory control, concentration, meditation, and ecstasy.
The steps cover every facet of daily life and apply to all people, regardless of age, gender, social status, or era. Some of the subjects addressed in the eight steps include ethics, care of the body through cleanliness and diet, quieting the mind, nonviolence, self study, and developing contentment.
Ironically, while "The Yoga Sutra" is considered the foundation for all modern yoga, it focuses very little on the physical poses, which make up the third step of posture. Posture is only briefly mentioned to help one sit comfortably for long periods while meditating. This is only further evidence that the history of yoga is not so much rooted in the physical realm as it is today.
Moreover, the sutras don't describe any postures, noting only that such poses should be steady and easy, so the meditation will not be interrupted by bodily sensations of comfort or discomfort. If you're trying to quietly meditate, you don't want to sit in a position that requires you to strain, but at the same time, you don't want to get so comfortable you fall asleep.
Today's yoga would seem foreign to the first yogis, who merely wanted to meditate without being distracted. "Most of the yoga practiced worldwide today would be unrecognizable to earlier yogis like Patanjali who attained realization in meditative stillness," notes Chip Hartranft in his 2003 translation of the "The Yoga Sutra."
Getting Physical
As you can see, the history of yoga does not involve a whole lot of fitness elements, but rather Modern yoga, which focuses primarily on the postures, is called hatha yoga. It first showed up in the 10th century, around 700 years after the Sutras were written. For hundreds of years after it first showed up, hatha remained unpopular with most yogis, had few practitioners, and was seen as a radical off-shoot of traditional meditative yoga.
"For generations, hatha yoga was a rather obscure and occult corner of the yoga realm, viewed with disdain by mainstream practitioners, kept alive by a smattering of isolated ascetics in caves and Hindu maths (monasteries)," says Anne Cushman in the "Yoga Journal" article New Light on Yoga.
Only in the late-1800s and early-1900s, when the Indian scholar Krishnamacharya began practicing and teaching hatha, did the style begin to take off. In the 1940s and 1950s, a handful of Krishnamacharya's students brought his style to America. From there, hatha yoga, with its focus on the physical body has become the most popular form, and many of the traditional meditative and spiritual aspects of yoga are now themselves considered outside of the mainstream, especially in the West.
The History of Yoga Comes Full Circle
Even though most forms of modern yoga center on the physical body, many people have embraced the complex history of yoga and find it can still be very spiritual. Learning to hold such demanding postures can take years to master, and because they require such intense concentration and dedication, they can hone one's mind and self-confidence.
After much practice, when people are able to do things with their bodies they never dreamed possible, a powerful sense of inner strength can arise—which for some is akin to spiritual faith. The Dean of the Kripalu School of Yoga, Devarshi Steven Hartman, believes that with time and dedicated practice, the asanas of modern yoga can bring about a highly spiritual experience, resembling the ecstasy sought by the earliest yoga practitioners.
"Some people ask me if yoga is a religion," says Hartman. "I like to say that yoga is not a religion but a set of practices. However, if you do the practices properly and regularly, over time you will have an experience that could be deemed religious."
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