Yoga in India

Yoga has a long history, it is very ancient. Yoga evolved on the Indian continent over a period of 5000 years. It has its roots in the Hinduism and Brahmanism, yet our contemporary western approach to yoga has little to do with any particular belief or religion. However, it can be said that our contemporary western approach to yoga is only a very small portion of what yoga is all about. Yoga is a deep well of knowledge which helps quell our thirst for the truth. Yoga contains several branches of learning which includes, Hatha Yoga, the physical branch of yoga everyone in the west is most familiar with. Yoga was developed by ascetics living primarily in the southern portions of India. These ascetics led very disciplined lives, they were vegetarians and they adhered to a nonviolent philosophy. They lived close to the earth; they observed nature, the animals and themselves. The first photo to the right is of Sri Yukteswar, Yogananda's teacher, he was an enlightened master ascetic.

These ascetics would imitate many of the animals they observed, their postures and habits, in order to emulate their strength, grace and wisdom. The ascetics lived in harmony with nature, exhibiting extraordinary health and endurance. Throughout ages, these ascetics or monks would continue to add to their growing body of knowledge about exercise and health as they tried to master their own bodies in an effort to produce the energy for the realization of truth. The word yoga is derived from Sanskrit, and in it's simplicity means 'to bind together' and 'to reunite'. Over time there has been a steady effort by many great Indian seers to develop and perfect specific techniques with which they could unite the lower mind with the higher mind or with what they called Universal Consciousness. Yoga is India's greatest gifts to the world, and we here in the west have only recently come to know and appreciate its many wonders.
Hinduism developed in India in the same historical period that yoga did and these two rich and profound philosophies have had great influence on each other, so much so, that until the beginning of the twentieth century all yogis were devout Hindu priests.

Then in the early part of the twentieth century, Hindu yoga masters or swamis, traveled to the west in order to share their religious beliefs and practices. Yoga at this point was to undergo another profound change as its light was about to be filtered through the prism of western existentialism and rational scientific materialism. These teachers brought a new spiritual awareness to the west. To the right is a photo of Yogananda one of the most influential spiritual masters to come to America. Our modern approaches to yoga have created clear delineations between the Hindu religion and the practice of yoga. Yoga as it has been developed in the west is largely concerned with the physical exercises and health promoting breathing exercises of yoga, it has moved away from it's original religiosity.

Yoga as practiced in the west is largely non-religious because the needs of America's large culture of health and exercise which used it for its own purposes. The most popular forms of yoga being taught today are combinations of yoga exercises and breath control, these practices are known as Hatha Yoga or just Yoga. Many styles of yoga have evolved over the last century, such as, Power Yoga, Bikrams, and Iyengar just to name a few, there are now more that 10 major styles of yoga. These styles all vary in how much they still embody the Hindu faith and its symbols and ideologies. The styles are also quite different in structure as they range from being quiet, slow, and restorative, to some which offer the most extreme forms of physical exercise you can find. Yoga is much more than exercise though, and with time, the deeper aspects of yoga will eventually touch western culture and change it forever, as Yoga itself will change because of western cultural influences.