A journey for your body and sensations

What is yoga?

By Ravi Dykema

        With origins as long ago as 5000 years in India, yoga has undergone changes and adaptations over all this time, and has spawned thousands of different "schools." So there is no simple answer to the question, what is yoga?

      People who hear the word yoga may think it refers to an exercise system, which originated in India that is characterized by pretzel-like positions and stretching. Some others think yoga also includes breathing and relaxation practices. A person who has taken a class in one of the relatively new systems at a fitness club may think yoga is a sweaty athletic endeavor designed to build stamina and strength. A person who has been to see a yoga therapist may think yoga is a complementary healing system. Yet others think yoga is a religious practice that involves gurus (spiritual authorities) and singing hymns in a foreign language. All of these definitions of "yoga" are accurate, and I could give you many more.

      The Sanskrit word "yoga" derives from the root, "yuj," to yoke, harness or join together. So yoga is commonly translated to mean "union." But, the union of what with what? In many yoga traditions, it means the union of your individual self, the "you" who says,  "I think," or "I am reading these words," with the "you" who is much bigger, much more a part of everything else. This bigger self is sometimes called your "spiritual self" or your "true self" or your "soul."

      What might this "union" feel like? When you walk out of a yoga class, the sky can seem bluer, the sun warmer on your hair, the breeze fresher on your cheek, and your step lighter. You may even feel a gladness and fullness in your heart that just is, that doesn't seem to be a response to anything that's happening. When you feel such fullness you may notice that your attention is on your immediate experience: your sensations, your vision, your hearing; and you may notice that your mental chatter is quieter than usual. That is the goal of most traditional yoga: to quiet your mind so your present experience becomes more vivid. In fact, the most famous passage in the most famous ancient yoga text-the Yoga Sutra by Patanjali-reads (loosely translated), "Yoga is stilling the mind. Then the Self is revealed."

      Yoga authorities, however, often describe the purpose of yoga differently. Here is a definition from Dinabandhu and Ila Sarley's The Essentials of Yoga (Dell, 1999): "Yoga is. designed to balance and unite the mind, body and spirit." A renowned yoga teacher from India, BKS Iyengar, writes in Yoga, The Path to Holistic Health  (DK Publishing, 2001), "The primary aim of yoga is to restore the mind to simplicity and peace, and free it from confusion and distress." Another great yoga teacher, Swami Vishnu Devananda, writes in the forward to The Shivananda Companion to Yoga (Fireside, 1983), "Yoga, the oldest science of life, can teach you to bring stress under control-not only on a physical level, but on mental and spiritual levels too."

      These different definitions of yoga are understandable when you consider that yoga has been evolving and changing throughout its history, and especially recently. Since about 1998 yoga has rapidly grown more and more popular, becoming a common offering at fitness clubs and recreation centers. A 1998 Roper poll, commissioned by Yoga Journal magazine, found that six million Americans practice yoga regularly. Three years later, in 2001, Time magazine published a story on yoga that featured supermodel Christy Turlington performing a yoga pose on the cover. The article claimed that 15 million Americans do some form of yoga, two and a half times as many as the number stated in the Roper poll three years before.

      With all these newcomers to yoga, the system itself is changing, further complicating the answer to, "What is yoga?" Teachers adapt their teachings to the people who are showing up for class. And yoga practitioners who are looking for training as teachers seek schools that present the kind of yoga with which they are familiar.

      All this rapid change is morphing yoga into something so different from the traditions from which it arose that yoga experts who studied the discipline just 20 years ago don't recognize it as yoga. Veteran journalist Anne Cushman writes in a 2002 Yoga Journal article, "Certainly, the form in which yoga is practiced has altered so radically in the West that it is almost unrecognizable to a traditional Hindu, Buddhist, or Jain practitioner." Some yoga experts and scholars are saying that modern fitness-only style yoga is an unfortunate distortion of a valuable tradition. Renowned yoga scholar, Georg Feuerstein, writes in a 2002 article in Yoga International magazine, "If we want to ensure a healthy future for yoga. we must not only look ahead, we must also look back into the past. We must remember yoga's traditional roots, for without a proper alignment with India's profound spiritual heritage our contemporary yoga practice is bound to be watered down more and more until it is ineffective as a tool for personal transformation." Another respected yoga teacher, Donna Farhi, writes in the introduction to Yoga Mind, Body and Spirit (Henry Holt, 2000), "Like the botanist who finally breeds the perfect rose only to discover that in the process he has lost the fragrance of the bloom, when we strip yoga to its mechanics, we also lose something essential. The task of today's teachers and students is to reclaim the essential spirit and intentions behind these practices."

      But other leaders in the yoga community disagree. They say that yoga has adapted (by focusing almost exclusively on the body) to the needs of people today, just as it has adapted for millennia to people's needs, and they believe that such changes are appropriate. Yet a third group of influential teachers justifies the narrowing of yoga into physical practices by saying that these practices are great as a means of self-improvement, and that some students so rewarded will become interested in the spiritual and mental aspects of yoga in time.

      Personally, I agree with the experts who urge a broader study of yoga. I feel that when we understand something of yoga's context, how it has developed over thousands of years into the remarkable systems we have today, we can benefit more from our practice of yoga asanas (poses) and yoga meditation.

      Ravi Dykema is an adjunct professor of yoga at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, where he teaches in the BA degree program in traditional eastern arts. He is currently writing a textbook on yoga. Dykema is also the publisher of Nexus magazine. He can be reached at ravi@holistic.com.  

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