A Glimpse Into the Evolution of Yoga
In the modern western world, we tend to think of yoga as a physical exercise that’s done on a yoga mat for a specified amount of time (when I started teaching, the standard length of a class was 90 minutes; now it’s an hour; and with the prevalence of youtube yoga, 15-30 minutes is often considered to be enough). The intention is usually body-focused (get in shape, increase flexibility, relieve pain) or mind-focused (reduce anxiety, process stress, manage emotions). We often have a vague idea of yoga as a spiritual practice in addition to these benefits, but for most modern yogis, that aspect of the practice usually goes unexplored.
At it’s roots, however, the intention of yoga was entirely spiritual. Yoga originated in India at least 5,000 years ago as a deeply meditative, monastic lifestyle consisting of ascetic, body-and-soul purifying practices, sometimes to extremes of self-denial and restriction in diet and movement that we would consider unhealthy or even self-abusive today. The ultimate goal of yoga was disconnecting from the material world and social engagement to enter into an enlightened, ecstatic state: yoga was a quest for pure truth, knowledge, insight into the universe, and union with divine energy.
The life of a yogi was often isolated - think of the hermit yogi living on a mountaintop, away from society and worldly troubles, undisturbed in his spiritual pursuits. Some yogis became gurus, or spiritual teachers, passing on their wisdom and energetic presence to their students or disciples in exchange for servitude. Students would live like monks in the guru’s home, cleaning the living and gathering spaces, growing and preparing all the food for the community and the guru, and generally taking care of all the day-to-day, worldly necessities of life while the guru devoted his time and energy to his practices.
In it’s original form, the physical practices of yoga - asana - consisted entirely of seated postures, like lotus. These postures and mudras were to be held in stillness while meditating, denying the body’s discomfort in the position until they were able to disconnect from feeling these sensations at all. In this way, the yogi was able to experience purity of the soul and was on the path to enlightenment.
In the 1800s the practice of yoga shifted: more physical postures were introduced, and several “grandfathers” of yoga developed postural practices to heal bodily ailments. Some had yoga schools where ailing people would come to be prescribed specific poses. The yogi or guru would instruct them to do these poses repeatedly for however long it took for their condition to change. Over time, poses were established as having specific functions for the body, mind, and spirit - being able to move and control the energy through the body, promoting optimal health.
As the asana practice was expanded in this way, the practice of yoga transformed into a healing tool as opposed to a strictly spiritual pursuit. People would visit yogis as if they were doctors, do their prescribed asana and pranayama, and heal. The people doing yoga for healing were not considered yogis, in the same way that we wouldn’t consider someone acting on a doctor’s orders to be a doctor. Yogis were the ones developing these healing regimens and maintaining the traditional yogic lifestyle - engaging in their meditation and enlightenment practices in their personal lives, but focusing more on the wellness of the body itself than ever before.
Krishnamacharaya teaching in Mysore, India, early 1900s
The late 1800s and early 1900s saw a global expansion of yoga as people from around the world were traveling to India to be healed at the yoga schools and seek deeper understanding of the practice. Yogis started training others to teach and be yogis with the expectation that these teachers would pass on the guru’s teachings, thus creating lineages of yoga, many of which still dominate the yoga world today.
As yoga became popularized in the west, particularly in America, western ideals and philosophies were melded into the original intentions of the ancient practice. Yoga became a commodity, marketed as a cure-all practice and, in many ways, was reduced to abstract ideas of perfection. There’s a lot to unpack about the modern Yoga Industry that I won’t go into in this post; but, suffice it to say, many Americans come to yoga today seeking physical change of some sort as opposed to spiritual connection.
Our lives today are structured very differently from those of people in millennia past - we live in a fast world, using technology constantly that they couldn’t have imagined - and our intention with yoga is more in line with the practices that were brought about in the 1800s. While we may be aware that yoga is fundamentally a spiritual practice, we don’t tend to make that a focus in our personal practice. The idea of what it means to be spiritually connected has also shifted greatly over the centuries: unlike the ancient yogis, many practices today attempt to increase our connection with body instead of denying it as a path to spiritual union.
That’s not to say that the yoga we do today isn’t valuable or spiritual; as with everything we do in yoga, how we practice is more important that what we practice. The intention we bring to the mat and to life is the practice of yoga.
I’ll expand upon these thoughts in future posts, but I’d love to know more about your own experiences and intentions with yoga as a mind-body-spirit practice in the comments below!