Episode Transcript
[00:00:11] Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of deep in your practice. I'm Lauren Leduc, founder of True Love Yoga and the head teacher in our yoga teacher training. And today we're going to talk about the history of yoga. So the history of yoga is THousands of years old. So obviously this will be brief and surface level in a way, but it's important to understand the history of what we're doing to provide some sort of context of where we are in modern yoga and figure out what our particular relationship, I think, is to the practice, and practice it with honor, of course. So we'll talk about why the history of yoga is important for both students and teachers. So yoga has evolved a lot over thousands of years, starting as a spiritual and philosophical practice before coming the more physical and meditative discipline that we know today. And I'd love, as you're listening to this, to maybe reflect on how the roots of yoga influence your current practice. And how can understanding yoga's history deepen your connection to yoga?
[00:01:21] So we'll get right into it, starting with the pre classical period of yoga, which stems back to around 5000 years ago. So we're going back about 5000 years. But as a caveat, I want to say that we don't fully know the origins of yoga. And there's a whole school of thought that yoga actually originated in Egypt, or known then as kemet, for much of the reason that we believe that it originated in the Indus Valley, which I'll talk about here in a little while. But if that's the case, yoga could potentially be 15, 20,000 years old, stemming back to ancient history. So again, we don't quite know, but we do know that practices, spiritual and religious schools of thought, different kinds of education, migrate around the world and they do this through natural migration, but also through colonization. Yoga's actual origins might be a little bit murky because we simply don't know.
[00:02:32] I did get to interview doctor Auburn Ellis, who teaches our kemetic yoga and anti racism in yoga course in the true love yoga teacher training, and got to ask her a little bit more about these origins. And I did that for my other podcast, your spiritual besties. But I think I'll replay it on this podcast so you can get a feel for it for that aspect of yoga as well. It's very, very cool. So now that brings me to about 5000 years ago to the Indus Valley civilization. So there are archaeological findings of seals and statues in meditation postures. So these early representations suggest that yoga's meditative roots could go back to the Indes Saraswati civilization, but it is speculative. Again, it's a little bit murky. Early connections between yoga and spiritual rituals used to commune with the divine or achieve self transcendence. Oops, what does that mean? So suspected that early connections between yoga and spiritual rituals were used to commune with the divine or to achieve some sort of transcendence. So this is the Indus Valley civilization, where India now is, which brings us to the vedic period, which is about 1500 to 500 bce. This is where we're introduced to the first yogic texts that we know of, which are the Vedas. So they're the ancient texts of India. Yoga's first textual mentions appear in the Rig Veda, where early Yogis, known as Rishis, sought spiritual knowledge through rituals and chants.
[00:04:14] And these were passed down orally between the monks for a long time. Then we see the Brahmanas and Upanishads, and they expand vedic philosophy, where the idea of uniting the self with the divine. So Yogin, or yoga, begins to take shape. And in this, we also are introduced to the concept of the Atman, the individual soul, and the Brahman, or universal consciousness. We now move to the next period of yoga, which is known as the classical period. So this is where we see many of the texts that Yogis study today. So this is first classified by Patanjali and the Yoga sutras, which were written around 200 bce to 400 ce. Obviously, that's a huge span of time. We don't know exactly when it was written, but it was sometime at the start of the millennium. I talk more about these in my episode about the eight limbs. So if you're interested more in the yoga sutras, I recommend listening to that particular episode, and I'll get more into that as well. It's widely studied in modern yoga, but just as an overview, the yoga sutras of Patanjali formalize the philosophy of yoga, and it's considered the foundation of classical yoga. And it outlines the eight limbed path, which is yama ethics, Niyama self discipline, asana posture, pranayama, breath control, pratyahara, withdrawal of the senses, dharana concentration, dhyana meditation, and samadhi, or enlightenment. It emphasizes yoga as a spiritual and mental discipline, with Asana playing a smaller role, in fact, really just playing the role of the seat for meditation. So the goal of yoga here is to still the mind and to achieve union with the divine, to realize our true nature. And I talk about this in episode one of this podcast. If you're interested in diving more deeply into that the next huge text of this period that's also widely studied today and revered is the Bhagavad gita. And that was written perhaps around 200 bce. So the Gita is an epic, it's within an epic tale, but in it is a battle between two families, with one man as the protagonist, in particular, Arjuna, and his mentor and God. Eventually, Krishna helps him step into his dharma and into the yogic path. So it outlines different yogic thoughts or schools, one being karma yoga, which is selfless action, one being bhakti yoga, which is devotion, and Jnana yoga, which is knowledge and wisdom. So these paths broaden the scope of yoga beyond physical postures, which weren't even necessarily studied around this point, we're not quite sure, and they place more importance on mindfulness and duty. So you can see this really wide span of time, maybe thousands of years. The yoga postures aren't even introduced yet until this next period, which is the post classical period of yoga, which is known for tantra and hatha yoga. Tantric influence occurred around 500 ce to 1500 ce. And tantric philosophy emphasized the importance of the physical body as a tool for spiritual awakening. So that's where we start to see some of these seeds of modern yoga being planted. And the concept of kundalini, or this snake like energy at the base of the spine. The divine feminine and chakras, or energy centers of the body emerge around this time. And tantra and hatha yoga provide many practices to awaken kundalini, to open the energy centers, and to find transcendence within and through the body. So hatha yoga, we're looking at about 11th to 15th century cede, and it's introduced in the Hatha yoga pradikapa, which is another widely studied text. But it's on the development of hatha yoga by Swami Swat Marama. And this period saw the development of many physical postures, or asanas, and breath work, or pranayama, as techniques to prepare the body for meditation and spiritual liberation. So it takes this idea of asana from Patanjali as this precursor to enlightenment, and really expands on that. And it was a lot different looking and feeling than we see today. It would be more akin to yin yoga, honestly, than like a vinyasa yoga, but way more extreme, where postures are held for a long period of time and many are named after animals and things in nature. And while you're in the posture for a long period of time, you are becoming one with that thing, whether it's a deity or an animal or mountain, whatever that might be, losing the separation, and that is one path to enlightenment. Pranayama, or breath control, is super important in hatha yoga, as well as mudras, and that's using the hands to seal energy in different ways, and bandas, which are body locks, and you're working with subtle energies to cleanse and purify the body. And besides the asanas, there are all kinds of practices of austerity within hatha yoga that are cleansing and purifying and frankly, pretty wild, to be honest, such as, I can't remember what this is called, but putting claws through your nostril and pulling it out through your throat, and then sort of flossing the sinuses in that way. And there are way more wild practices that stem from this time period as well. So HAtha yoga represents the shift from mind to body. So mind is still important, but there's more focus on body and breath as tools for spiritual and physical growth. And this starts to lay the foundation for our modern asana practice. So we come to the period of modern yoga, which is around the late 19th to early 20th century. And there are a couple main figures that popularized yoga in the west, one being Swami Vivekananda. He brought yoga philosophy to the west at the Parliament of World religions in Chicago in 1893. And he introduced western audiences to Raja yoga, which is the Eightfold path, and Jnana Yoga, the yoga of wisdom. And this was a huge deal, especially among spiritualist communities in the United States. Another huge figure of this time is Paramahansa Yogananda. He arrived in the US in 1920 with his teachings of KRIya yoga, and it helped make yoga become a bit more accessible through self realization and meditation and specific practices through that. If you've ever heard of autobiography of a yogi, this is Paramahanse Yogananda's story as told by him. AroUNd the same time, these figures were popularizing the philosophy of Yoga in the West. There is a figure named Krishna Macharya in the early 20th century, who is often called the father of modern yoga. So all around the world, there was popularization of fitness as a pastime and through colonization, this also influenced India and in turn, yoga. So Krishna Macharya is again often called the father of modern yoga. And he combined these different fitness modalities that started becoming popular around the world, like wrestling and gymnastics, and creating something that was specific and kind of exciting and very much Indian in nature, and where that's where we see really the beginnings of our modern vinyasa practice. And KRIshna MACHArya had three main Patabi Joyce, who is the founder of Ashtanga yoga BKS Iyengar, who is the founder of Ayengar Yoga, and Indra Devi, who was one of the first women to bring yoga to the west. He had other famous students as well, who popularize their own forms of yoga. But Krishna Machary is the father of this more dynamic and athletic style that we know today. So the rise of vinyasa flow and power yoga were introduced by teachers like Baron Baptiste and Brian Kest later in the eighties and nineties. And we focus on this shift from traditional meditative yoga to a more physically demanding, posture based practice that really dominates the western scene today and has many, many iterations. And we now see yoga in the 21st century as a multibillion dollar industry.
[00:13:35] And this, rightfully so, leads to a lot of criticism and concerns around the commodification of this practice of cultural appropriation and this disconnection between where we are now and the roots of yoga. However, there are movements of teachers and studios becoming more aware of the roots of yoga, honoring those, while also teaching to a modern bodies. People's needs have evolved and changed over years. We live in a very different world than we used to. We have technology all over. Our pace is very quick. We use our bodies even differently a lot of times now because of our use of technology and driving and things like that. So there is this need to combine our current scientific knowledge of kinesiology, of exercise science, with the roots of yoga, to create a practice that is really helpful for people, that serves them, and most importantly, connects them to their spirit, to the self, to their inner calm, to their inner voice. So now we also see contemporary yoga as this product of globalization. There are online yoga classes everywhere. There are yoga social media influencers, there are yoga challenges. And there are all different types and styles of yoga that are being offered. Some that honor the roots of yoga, some not so much. So we think about what connects us to the roots of yoga, what connects us to our truest self, to our soul, to our inner stillness.
[00:15:19] And as modern yogis, I think it's really important to use discernment to figure out how we want our practice to look and how it affects others. On one hand, it's amazing that yoga is everywhere that is very accessible to people. On the other, it can be a little disappointing when it's removed from its philosophical teachings and when it's fully removed from the culture from whence it came, where we're not honoring or respecting that culture, but we're taking something of theirs and making it our own. So I really like to emphasize to teacher trainees that we are stewards of this practice. Yes, we are shining this practice through a modern lens for modern people. But we did not create this practice. We do not own it. We are simply here to serve. Another question I have probably more than answers is how do you practice yoga without appropriating the culture? How do we appreciate the culture instead? Are we using symbols or music or mantras and totally divorcing them from the culture from where they came, or from their meaning or their sacredness? Are we performing yoga or are we embodying yoga? How do we do this in a modern world? Also, are we solely focused on the physical postures, or are we diving more deeply? Are we deepening our practice? And can that honor yoga's roots? Can that lead to a deep appreciation of the practice? How do we balance this? So my call to you, to yoga practitioners would be to return to yoga's roots. Start to visit some of these texts that I've talked about today in this episode. How can you dive more deeply? How can you learn more? How can you infuse that into your physical practice? And as teachers, how can we focus more on inclusivity, accessibility and spiritual growth in our practices while also honoring where everyone is coming from and their own personal beliefs and ethics? In my opinion, yoga's original intent, self realization and liberation, can absolutely still be a driving force in contemporary practices. There are so many skillful ways to infuse this into the movement, into the breath, into theming, into the words you use when you teach, into knowing better and doing better, being open to changing the way you do things. These are the types of things we discuss in the true love yoga teacher training because typically we have a group of people who love yoga who even will say yoga saved their lives. I have said this all the time about myself.
[00:18:17] How do we share this practice with others respectfully? How do we share it without ego? How do we share it while honoring and respecting its roots and our modern bodies? At the same time, I personally think while we might not be able to do it perfectly, that we can try, we can try our best, and that we can change and adapt when it's called for, when we have new information. So I'm going to throw out a couple of reflections for you. If you want to journal after this, go for it. I'll ask you how your yoga practice might change if you focus less on physical postures and more on the ethical, spiritual, or meditative aspects of yoga. My other question is, how can we honor yoga's original purpose, self realization, unity and liberation through our current practice? So whether you're a yoga student or a yoga teacher, I really encourage you to take the time to sit with this. I can give you techniques and tips and let you know from my own experience, but I do think this deep reflection is such a part of our growth journey and of learning and of embodying this desire for respect and connection of realization. So I really encourage you to take the time to sit with this. So just to recap, we go all the way back to the Indus Valley for pre classical yoga, or the origins of yoga, and quite possibly to Egypt or Kemet long before that. Then we move into the classical period of yoga where we find the yoga sutras and the bhagavad gita, into the post classical period where we explore Tantra and hatha. Yoga and the body and the breath really become important, into yoga's evolution into modern times with the fathers of modern yoga, including Patanjali, but also Vivekananda and Paramahansa Yogananda. Bringing yoga to the west and eventually, and very quickly becoming wildly popular, becoming an industry in itself and becoming something that is so life changing and beautiful, but also has the potential drive us into commercialism, drive us into appropriation and into things that separate us rather than unite us. So how do we move forward from this? I know I'll keep trying my best. I hope you do too. I will link to some resources on yoga history and the show notes in case this piqued your interest and you'd like to dive deeper. And I thank you for taking the time to consider how yoga's past informs your present practice. Om Shanti, Shanti shanti. Om. Peace, peace, peace. Until next time.
