With the help of the Indian government, their teachings spread far and wide, and asanas—reformulated as physical culture and therapy—quickly gained a legitimacy they had not previously enjoyed in the post-Vivekanandan yoga revival. Although Kuvalayananda and Yogendra are largely unknown in the West, their work is a large part of the reason we practice yoga the way we do today. The other highly influential figure in the development of modern asana practice in 20th-century India was, of course, T.
Iyengar , K. Pattabhi Jois , Indra Devi , and T. Krishnamacharya was steeped in the traditional teachings of Hinduism, holding degrees in all six darshanas the philosophical systems of orthodox Hinduism and Ayurveda. But he was also receptive to the needs of his day, and he was not afraid to innovate, as evidenced by the new forms of asana practice he developed during the s.
These experiments eventually grew into several contemporary styles of asana practice, most notably what is known today as Ashtanga vinyasa yoga. So where did this leave me? It seemed clear that the styles I practiced were a relatively modern tradition, with goals, methods, and motives different from those traditionally ascribed to asanas. One only has to peruse translations of texts like the Hatha Tattva Kaumudi, the Gheranda Samhita, or the Hatha Ratnavali, to see that much of the yoga that dominates America and Europe today has changed almost beyond recognition from the medieval practices.
Did this make the yoga I was practicing inauthentic? This was not a casual question for me. My daily routine during those years was to get up before dawn, practice yoga for two and a half hours, and then sit down for a full day researching yoga history and philosophy.
At the end of the day, I would teach a yoga class or attend one as a student. My whole life revolved around yoga. I went back to the library. I discovered that the West had been developing its own tradition of gymnastic posture practice long before the arrival of Indian asana pioneers like B.
And these were spiritual traditions, often developed by and for women, which used posture, breath, and relaxation to access heightened states of awareness. There was little doubt in my mind that many yoga practitioners today are the inheritors of the spiritual gymnastics traditions of their great-grandparents far more than they are of medieval hatha yoga from India. And those two contexts were very, very different.
Rather, as syncretic yoga practices were developing in the modern period, they were interpreted through the lens of, say, the American harmonial movement, Danish gymnastics, or physical culture more generally. And this profoundly changed the very meaning of the movements themselves, creating a new tradition of understanding and practice.
This is the tradition that many of us have inherited. Although I never broke off my daily asana practice during this time, I was understandably experiencing something like a crisis of faith. The first, is that yoga is a 5, year-old, timeless, monolithic tradition, revealed by ancient Vedic sages, espoused by many contemporary yoga gurus and practitioners, both in the west and India.
The second, held by some scholars and authors, is that yoga i. According to Seth, neither of these "yoga positions" hold against the current historical evidence we now have, and that the truth likely falls somewhere in between. Such meditative "seats" were well-known and utilized by ascetics and seekers across sectarian traditions, including Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains, and are well-depicted throughout Indian literature and visual art.
This is confirmed not only by the textual, but visual record as well; as we find bas relief sculptures on the walls of some South Indian temples, paintings, and even an illustrated Persian yoga manuscript commissioned by a Mughal prince, all dating to the same contemporaneous period.
All of this, before the colonial period. Finally, Seth stressed, that while many of these Sanskrit yoga texts were composed in a "Hindu" milieu, their authors often attempted to distance themselves from current sectarian trends, aiming for accessibility and inclusivity, by emphasizing the praxis of yoga technique over metaphysical theory or philosophical doctrine.
We also see in such texts, the movement from a strict renunciant practice to the inclusion of householders, and even occasionally female practitioners. As a yoga student for 27 years, and a yoga teacher for the past 18, I had been operating under the assumption that I was indeed practicing an ancient meditative tradition. But all along, something did not feel quite right to me about that assumption. Sixteen years ago, I remember showing poses to my boyfriend, a gifted martial artist, and he would often comment that the poses were just a small gesture away from being some of the same moves he did in sparring, fighting, etc.
Might the Warrior Pose actually have been a pose to train real warriors and fighters? Did classic postures truly speak to their needs, their bodies, and to the stresses that faced them? My own inner conflict peaked about 10 years ago when I could no longer justify teaching a set sequence of postures.
One of the precepts of yoga is aparigraha , or non-attachment. Yoga encourages us to not be so attached to physical or mental constructs of ourselves. What Singleton has now unearthed is the possibility of letting go of the historical construct of yoga postures.
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