The Biggest Yoga Class event at Rushcutters bay featuring several hundred yoga enthusiasts enjoying the morning
YOGA has become more popular around the world in recent years, with the number of people taking part in the discipline almost doubling between 2002 and 2012.
In December, the United Nations declared June 21 the International Day of Yoga. The first celebration saw colossal gatherings of yogis worldwide. Yoga has become one of the most fashionable practices in the world, yet a number of myths have grown up around it.
Yoga originated with Hindus
ADVOCATES and critics alike perpetuate the myth of its ancient Hindu origins. High-profile conservative pastors have warned of Christians’ inevitable Hinduisation should they take up yoga. The Hindu American Foundation has made similar arguments, criticising Americans for failing to acknowledge yoga’s Hindu origins – calling it “one of the greatest gifts of Hinduism to mankind” – and explaining that practitioners subject themselves to Hindu influences, intentionally or not.
Although there are countless Hindu forms of yoga, the notion that it is originally or definitively Hindu ignores its historical diversity. Throughout its history, yoga was shaped by an array of South Asian practices, ideas and aims widespread among not only Hindus but also Buddhists, Jains and adherents of other religions. Modern postural yoga – that popular fitness regimen made up of sequences of challenging poses – has more varied origins. It is a result of cross-cultural exchanges and influences from modern medicine, sports and exercise programs. In the 1930s, Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, for example, became one of the first postural yoga gurus. He was Hindu but taught a form of yoga partly shaped by British calisthenics. Modern Western yoga was created by practitioners from India, Europe and the United States, with a wide array of religious beliefs.
In many parts of the world, yoga aficionados tend to avoid describing the practice as religious. Yoga studios, conferences and journals prefer to define it as a regimen for nonsectarian “spiritual growth” or physical “fitness”. But while yoga isn’t specifically Hindu, that doesn’t mean it can’t be religious.
Some forms of modern yoga have explicitly religious aims, from Hindu schools such as siddha yoga, to Christian varieties such as holy yoga, which describes its mission as “experiential worship … to deepen people’s connection to Christ”. Even in other forms, yoga has implicit spiritual dimensions. Practitioners participate in scripted rituals requiring a sequence of postures to reorient them away from business and stresses and towards self-improvement.
Yoga is not religious
YOGA classes in secular contexts have qualities that set a religious mood. B.K.S. Iyengar, a significant figure in the creation of modern postural yoga, tied his form of the practice to the ancient “Yoga Sutras of Patanjali”, which emphasise the exalted aim of enlightenment. K. Pattabhi Jois, another 20th-century influencer of modern yoga, taught that the nine positions of the sun salutation sequence derive from the earliest Hindu texts, the Vedas.
The role of Swami Vivekananda
IN the New York Times a few years back, Ann Louise Bardachwrote, wryly, that “you might blame Vivekananda” – a turn-of-the-century Hindu reformer and Indian nationalist who created a system of modern yoga called raja yoga – “for having introduced ‘yoga’ into the national conversation.” It’s a view echoed recently by the New Indian Express, which described him as “The Father of Yoga in the West.”
The swami is known for a well-received speech he gave in Chicago in 1893 to the Parliament of the World’s Religions, in which he declared that “sectarianism, bigotry and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth” and “had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now.” But the speech, in fact, never mentioned yoga.
In terms of his yogic teachings, Vivekananda had several Indian, European and North American contemporaries whose work was equally influential in the development of some of yoga’s earliest modern forms. Nineteenth-century American social radical Ida C. Craddock, who defended belly dancing’s “much needed blend of sexuality and spirituality”, for example, created a yoga system for married couples looking to improve their sex lives.
Another early modern yoga advocate was Paramahansa Yogananda, an Indian guru who travelled to the US and taught yoga to Americans in the first half of the 20th century. He envisioned yoga as a scientific path to the experience of God. The organisation he founded, the Self-Realization Fellowship, is still thriving.
Vivekananda’s emphasis on self-control, meditation and psychology appealed to many who challenged institutionalised religion. He encouraged his disciples to turn inward, towards the self, rather than outward, towards external authorities. But he wasn’t a fan of yoga poses – and those, of course, are what most of us envision when we think of yoga.
It takes money to practise yoga
PRACTITIONERS in the US alone spend more than $US10 billion a year on classes, clothing and accessories. A typical studio class can cost more than $US18, and an outfit pushes $US200. One of the most ubiquitous symbols of yoga’s commercialisation is the mat, which many consider a necessity to prevent slipping, to mark territory in crowded classes or to create a ritual space. The most committed adherents can shell out more than $US100 for a top-of-the-line mat.
But these accessories are recent additions to the experience. The first purpose-made yoga mat was not manufactured and sold until the 1990s. Before then, yoga was practised on grass, towels, rugs or bare wooden floors. Today, a small set of traditionalists refuses to use mats, arguing that they interfere with the practice, especially by distracting the yogi from the true aims of yoga and towards the accumulation of commodities.
Some yoga advocates have rejected its commercialisation by offering nonprofit classes and opening studios that spurn expensive accessories. Yoga to the People, for instance, offers donation-based classes in several cities, and part of its mantra is: “There will be no correct clothes, there will be no proper payment, there will be no right answers.”
Yoga is now being introduced in marginalised communities, with classes in prisons, schools in low-income neighbourhoods and homeless shelters.
Yoga is about fitness
WHEN we think of yoga today, we envision spandex-clad, perspiring, toned bodies in a room filled with mats. Many yoga enthusiasts say physical fitness is their primary motivation, according to a Yoga Journal survey, and 78 per cent say they’re in it mostly to gain flexibility. That vision is a modern invention.
Beginning around the 7th and 8th centuries, Buddhists, Hindus and Jains reworked yoga into varying tantric systems with goals ranging from becoming an embodied god to developing supernatural powers, such as invisibility or flight.
In the early days of modern yoga, turn-of-the-century Indian reformers, along with Western social radicals, focused on the practice’s meditative and philosophical dimensions. For most of them, the physical aspects were not of primary importance.
Jain is the author of Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture.
The Washington Post