Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Foreign.
[00:00:12] Welcome to deepen your yoga practice. I am Lauren leduc, the owner and founder of True Love Yoga in Kansas City, Missouri. And today we're deepening our yoga practices by talking about yoga history and specifically, five really common misconceptions that get repeated so often that they start to sound like facts. And I want to say this up front. This isn't about calling anyone out. Most of us have learned yoga through modern studios, modern trainings, modern books, and modern marketing.
[00:00:41] So if any of these myths sound familiar, that doesn't mean you're wrong. It just means that you're normal and that you're listening. But this really matters. When we understand where yoga actually came from and how it evolved, we practice with more humility, more discernment and honesty, as well as more depth. I want to give a quick shout out to the yoga history course by Doug Keller that's on Yoga International. I just took a deep dive into that, so that's what inspired me to create this episode. And I personally just love to keep learning. And honestly, the more I learn, the more I realize I do not know. And I appreciate people who have gone through this deep study, both historically and philosophically, and are able to distill this information down in a way that is understandable and digestible. So let's get into it. These are five myths about yoga history and what a more accurate story can offer us instead. So myth number one.
[00:01:45] Yoga is thousands of years old in its current form, so people sometimes imagine this unbroken line of ancient yogis doing the same postures we're doing, maybe the same format in some ways to what we're doing now. So more accurately, what we do now is called modern postural yoga.
[00:02:07] It is a fitness and wellness class that centered on asana sequences. And it's largely a modern development from what we know of yoga history.
[00:02:17] We don't see postures beyond seated meditation really being explicitly named or taught until about the late 1400s. The Hatha Yoga pradipika, where these different postures are laid out, there's only 15 of them. So these 15 postures, maybe more, I'm not sure, were practiced for hundreds of years. Even sun salutations that we typically think of as ancient have their roots in Vedic practices where there were rituals to daily honor the sun.
[00:02:53] The actual specific sequence of the 12 poses wasn't really known or popularized until the 1920s and 30s.
[00:03:02] So we know there was some sort of daily ritual to honor the sun.
[00:03:08] Origins of the actual Surya Namaskar as a physical practice pre 1920s and 30s is actually pretty murky. So. So this modern postural yoga was shaped really in the late 19th, but especially the early 20th century alongside Indian physical culture and global exercise movements. So yoga as a concept and its roots are very ancient and layered.
[00:03:36] But the format that most of us practice, like being in a class doing standing sequences and sun salutations, the vinyasa, flow, alignment cues, et cetera, is definitely not what people were doing 2,000 years ago. So we're doing this, hopefully we're doing this ancient practice, but through modern packaging, through a modern lens. I'll also add that you don't have to pretend your practice is ancient to let it be meaningful.
[00:04:06] That depth comes from sincerity, not from pretending nothing has changed.
[00:04:12] Additionally, great yoga teachers are going to have an understanding of the roots of yoga and are able to weave philosophy and energetics, breath practices, mantra, mudra, chakras, things of that nature, into this more modern physical practice so that we can still explore all of its wonderful benefits and freedom that it has to offer. Myth number two is that yoga came from the Vedas. So yoga is often described as Vedas as if the term came directly from the Vedic religion or tradition. Typically when you take a yoga history course, the Vedas are the first thing that's introduced to you. Actually at True Love we talk about the possible ancient origins of yoga in Egypt, although there's less known about that, but it's very interesting. Typically you're going to hear yoga was created in the Indus Valley. The first era was the Vedic period. This isn't quite accurate. So. So the Vedas provide a sense of Dharma, a purpose for everyone and everything. And they are rules for life passed down by Brahmins or priests who were of a very noble class and who were hired by royals to perform ritual. They established much of this ancient culture. But later on different influences came in and this practice oriented yoga, and even yoga being defined as a thing, is more associated with renunciant or ascetic movements, also called Shramana, traditions that developed alongside and sometimes in tension with these Brahmanical or Vedic frameworks. So there was this tension and then this change that happened at a specific period with the addition of the upanishads from about 800 B.C. to 400 B.C. that opened yoga up more to the householder and that de emphasized these Brahmins a bit. Sorry. So in this period we can know that yoga also includes these radical traditions of renunciation, of discipline and liberation that weren't primarily about ritual status or social identity. The Katha Upanishad is often cited as the first text where the word yoga, which is derived from the word yug, explicitly describes a systematic mental discipline of yoking of the senses to achieve a state of steady attention.
[00:06:54] So this is like 5th to 1st century BCE, which post dates the Rig Veda in this Brahmanic period. But regardless, we can know that yoga didn't come from one single source. There are Vedic and Upanishadic threads, but there are also strong roots in the renunciant world, particularly in Jainism, where liberation wasn't the goal and practice was actually the method. This gave yoga this strong tradition of ethical restraint, of meditation, discipline and the idea of freedom requiring the training of the mind. So while rooted in the Vedas, yoga comes from a family of traditions and a mix of cultures and wasn't really clear, clearly defined as a practice until this Upanishad period. Myth number three is that yoga is about flexibility, which I don't know who really believes that, but I think it is what we see often when we see yoga, like if you can touch your toes and do deep back bends, that you're good at yoga, more accurately, yoga is about freedom. It's about liberation from suffering and confusion and the patterns that keep us bound to that. So yoga is this response to human suffering and, and how to find freedom from that. In classical yoga, like Patanjali's yoga Sutras, this is all about the mind. This is clarity, discernment and liberation from the physical. And then we see this liberation in different ways in the Hatha Yoga traditions as this like merging with the infinite. So we can know that asana or poses are incredible, we love experiencing them and that they're just a tool. They're not really the finish line.
[00:08:41] Flexibility might happen, it might be a part of the practice. Same with strength. Calm might be a part of the practice, but those are really side effects of the practice of yoga. Yoga is actually changing our relationship to suffering and learning how to live with more clarity and integrity. So instead of how deep is my pose, we can ask, can I stay with my breath?
[00:09:04] Can I notice my reactivity and not obey it? Can I be honest about what I need today?
[00:09:10] Those are all beautiful ways to practice yoga. Myth number four, and I touched a bit on this, is that yoga is one unified system. Yoga is not that. In fact, it's better understood as a family of traditions. So multiple systems that evolved over time as responses to human suffering, embodiment and spiritual aims.
[00:09:33] Even the word yoga itself has had shifted meanings over the years of union of discipline, method, concentration, et cetera. And when you read across traditions, you find a huge diversity of practices of mantra, breath, meditation, bandhas, visualization, devotion, ethical vowels, austerities, and even more than that. So the more you learn, the more you realize how vast and varied it really is and how many different traditions were developing alongside each other, the discoveries being made and the ways of practice. So yoga is not this single tree. We can think of it more like this forest. So as teachers, this can help us avoid rigidity, so being really tied to the dogma of one particular style as the real yoga.
[00:10:27] It also helps us avoid oversimplification in that it's all the same.
[00:10:31] It also helps us avoid appropriation by erasure, so we're not flattening these diverse traditions into one vague vibe. So the last myth is that the body has always been central, that yoga has always been body focused and posture based.
[00:10:48] If you've been listening, you probably already know this isn't true. The role of the body changes really dramatically depending on the period and tradition of yoga. In some streams of classical yoga, the body can be framed as something to discipline, to stabilize, or even to completely transcend and divorce ourselves from in service of liberation, including in Patanjali's yoga sutras, we're really divorcing ourselves from the body to find this state of pure soul of Purusha. In Tantric and Hatha developments, the body becomes very central and important.
[00:11:26] Embodiment becomes important not as fitness, but as this powerful vehicle for transformation and liberation through subtle body models and techniques. So the body wasn't always the main point. But over time, certain traditions made the body more central, especially in Hatha yoga, where physical practices were taught as important and necessary for liberation, where we can find liberation within our bodies and through the body. So this helps remind us as modern students that asana absolutely can be profound, and it was developed to be profound.
[00:12:05] But its depth also depends on how we practice our inner awareness and what we think it's for. So what do we do with all of this as modern students?
[00:12:15] One, we don't have to throw out modern yoga.
[00:12:19] We also don't have to romanticize it. We can know the truth and understand the roots as best as we can, so that we can practice with more integrity and respect to the lineage, to the various lineages.
[00:12:35] So this is an invitation to go deeper and to practice with more honesty. So we can ask, is modern yoga fake yoga? And I'll say, it's not fake, it's just modern.
[00:12:46] Modern does not mean meaningless and this is a constantly evolving practice that has evolved through many people and many points of view.
[00:12:56] So I believe that what we are doing now is perfectly valid, but it's also important to understand where it came from. Also, do I need to stop saying ancient practice?
[00:13:07] I think that you can say yoga has ancient roots and just be careful implying that an exact class format has been unchanged for thousands of years because it's simply not true. We can also ask, what should I do with this? And my response would be to practice with respect, to keep learning, to give credit, and to stay curious. So if this episode stirred something up, great. That's the point.
[00:13:33] I'm not here to make you cynical, but to make you curious. Yoga is not this fossil. Instead, it's a living tradition with many branches, or it's a forest. As we said, it's evolved and adapted and been reinterpreted over thousands of years. And your practice, your breath, your attention, your ethics belong in that living story. If you want to deepen your practice, start here. Choose one thing you've believed about yoga that might be more complicated than you were taught, and stay curious instead of defensive. If you found this episode helpful, share it with friend or a teacher, or send it to someone who's new to yoga and thinks they're bad at it because they can't touch their toes. And if you want more yoga history episodes, please let me know. I love nerding out on this stuff. We can go a lot more deeply into specific periods and what we can glean from them. That sounds like a whole lot of fun, actually. I will cite some sources in the show notes if you want to go more deeply into this learning. And I want to thank you so much for listening today, for nerding out with me on yoga history, and let's talk about it again soon.
[00:14:40] Thanks so much. Om Shanti, Om Peace.
