The unspoken secret of yoga revealed: the origins of asana

Warning: After reading this your idea about Yoga will never be the same. 

I´ve practised yoga for more than fifteen years. After ten years, I also started teaching it. Now, I´ve given up teaching yoga as we see it here in the Western world. The discoveries I made about the history of yoga and the origins of asana were a major turning point for my yoga. Follow me on this journey and I promise your idea about yoga will never be the same.

The truth about asana: Ancient practise or modern gymnastics? 

Yoga asanas are a pretty new invention. They were added to yoga to counter the European gymnastics movement. They are not an ancient heritage from the past masters, but a last century creation. - How many yoga practisioners or teachers know this?

 After a shocking encounter with Mark Singleton´s article The Roots of Yoga in Yoga journal, I was puzzled. What Singleton claimed, was that yoga asanas were not an ancient practise that had been passed down for generations in India from the guru´s and teacher, but that they were added to Indian culture in the early 20^th century. They were a response to the decline in Indian physical culture and a counterstrike towards the European gymnastic movement, which was going strong on the moment. The yoga was synthesized, taking heritage from the age old Indian tradition but being boosted with the European gymnastics movement to become more solid practise – This was the birth of modern yoga.

In the meantime, I dipped into some more on the study of the origins of Asana. Singleton holds a PhD from Cambridge University. He´s done an enormous amount of research for his book: Yoga body, the origins of modern posture practise. What I came up with really embraced my view of Yoga with totally radical ideas. Yoga isn´t a systematical tradition of methods that has been there for hundreds or thousands of years. Just breath in, and check out the pictures below:

The images are from two sources: "Anatomy of a contortionist," Scribner´s Magazine, 1889 and B.K.S Iyengar´s Light on Yoga, 1966.

So the almost identical postures were displayed earlier in European Gymnastics magazine, and adopted to the yogic practise after the colonial influence in India. I´m not saying that these pictures would prove anything, but it´s pretty convincing text that Singleton hammers down with his books and articles. Everything is documented in very detailed manner and the sources are academically listed.

The shocking truth is, that our romantic ideas about yoga as an authentic spiritual tradition, being passed forwards generations after generations in an unchanging form, are a belief without any historical evidence. On the contrary, the evidence points out that modern yoga was created to respond to the concern of wellbeing of Indian people. The funny thing is that it was then exported to western world, as an "original" Indian practise. - Nobody bothered to mention the effect of European gymnastics on it.

As a spiritual practise, do you know many people who´ve reached enlightenment via the practise of asanas? We could see the inclusion of asana to yoga practise as the evolution of yoga. For sure they give you benefits, physically and also open the road for consciousness to dwell in your body. But still, I wouldn´t worry too much, if I couldn´t perform this or that asana. After all, they´re just gymnastics. You can make anything benevolent into your spiritual practise. There are myriads of methods that you can use to combine your mind and body into a single action of existence in  this moment. - What else do we need?

Singleton´s article: http://www.yogajournal.com/article/philosophy/yoga-s-greater-truth/

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