After all, yoga means a lot of different things to different people. And for many Americans—including doctors who recommend yoga to their patients—yoga is seen only as a form of “stretching.” In fact, when I started taking yoga classes, I didn’t have a clue what was. When I was in my late twenties, I was working at a small software company and my colleagues and I decided to start an on-site exercise class. One of our co-workers said that his wife could come and teach them, so we decided to give her a go—we had no idea she was a yoga teacher! So, on the first day of class, there we all were, standing around in our exercise clothes, when the teacher asked us to start by taking “Mountain pose,” with our big toes together and our heels slightly apart. This was the opposite foot position from the one I was used to doing in ballet and modern dance, my previous forms of preferred exercise. And just standing that way felt so wonderful for my body, I thought, whatever this is, this is for me! My experience of falling in love with the asana practice (the practice of the physical postures) without knowing anything about the rest of the yoga is actually very common.
In fact, yoga as an exercise system is only a very small part of a much larger tradition and a very recent development in the long history of yoga. Although yoga is arguably thousands of years old, what yogis were doing back in the early days had nothing at all to do with Tree pose or Sun Salutations. Early yogis were spiritual seekers, with the aim of understanding the ultimate truths of reality. In order to pursue these goals, they developed practices, including meditation and pranayama (breath control), which would allow them to concentrate and free their minds from distraction. An early definition of yoga from the Katha Upanisad is:
“When the control of the senses is fixed, that is Yoga, so people say. For then, a person is free from distraction. Yoga is the “becoming,” and the “ceasing.”
Although the original yogis were Hindus (see Modern Yoga and Hinduism) with religious goals of achieving “union with the divine,” the yoga techniques they developed for quieting the mind were so effective and their teachings about the nature of the mind and the causes of human suffering were so profound that yoga was adopted by other religions, including Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. (And, of course, in modern times, people of many other religions—and no religion at all—also practice yoga.) Naturally as yoga spread throughout the East and among very different peoples, it evolved in a myriad of ways. Yoga was eventually codified by Patanjali in 150-200 CE in The Yoga Sutras— which we still use as a reference to this day—however, the school of yoga summarized in this work was just one of the many schools of yoga that existed during that era.
And it wasn’t until Tantra and Hatha Yoga developed (approximately 800 or 900 CE) that various physical practices, such as working with chakras and prana, and yoga postures became an essential aspect of yoga. Even then, although the Hatha Yoga Pradipika (1200 -1300 CE) mentions the existence of 84 poses (asanas), it describes only 15 by name. And the aim of practicing these postures was to allow the practitioner to be able to remain comfortably seated in meditation for long periods of time.
“The Âsanas are a means of gaining steadiness of position and help to gain success in contemplation, without any distraction of the mind. If the position be not comfortable, the slightest inconvenience will draw the mind away from the lakśya (aim), and so no peace of mind will be possible till the posture has ceased to cause pain by regular exercise.”
It was really only in the 20th century that pivotal figures such as T.K.V. Krishnamacharya and B.K.S. Iyengar developed the modern asana practice as we now know it. These teachers consciously expanded the repertoire of traditional poses—blending British and Chinese gymnastics, European fitness techniques, and Indian wrestling with classic hatha yoga postures—developed the use of yoga props, with the aim of making yoga accessible to ordinary people, and adapted yoga for treating medical conditions. (If you’re disappointed that the modern asana practice was essentially invented in the early twentieth century, take a moment to acknowledge what geniuses those teachers were—the system they developed was so effective and powerful, it spread throughout the world.) During this period, for many practitioners in the west, “yoga” became completely disassociated from its spiritual aspects and the asana practice was adopted solely as an exercise system.
These days, yoga is all these things and more (trying to cover thousands of years of yoga history in a few paragraphs means simplifying quite a bit to put it mildly). As Edwin Bryant says, “Yoga is thus best understood as a cluster of techniques, some more or less systematized, that pervaded the landscape of ancient India.” So even though I don’t have a one-sentence definition I can use with authority to say what yoga is, we here at YFHA clearly have a very rich tradition to draw on.
Since this is a how-to blog about using yoga techniques to foster healthy aging, we’ve selected just a subset of those yoga techniques to focus on. These techniques are the ones that we believe are most valuable (and that we ourselves practice on a regular basis).
- Asana. Both postures that help keep your body strong and healthy and postures that provide deep physical relaxation.
- Meditation. Different forms of meditation that provide various ways to develop concentration, quiet the mind, and learn about your habitual thought patterns.
- Pranayama. Breath practices that are calming or energizing, and that help build concentration and focus the mind.
- Philosophy. Yoga scriptures, including the Bhagavad Gita and the Yoga Sutras, that contain wisdom which can guide us through all phases of life.
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