Modern Yoga Asana: A Fusion of Old and New
Within a bare, mirrorless studio, a small group of students in inconspicuous yoga garb are tuning out distraction from the modern world. No music plays; instead, they follow along to the instructor’s 26 postural cues, and the unifying surge of Ujjayi breath. Meanwhile, across town, the calming scent of lavender greets incoming yogis from a diffuser at the front desk. They check in using an iPad, and file into class in an array of high-end leggings. From Hatha, to Ashtanga, to Yin– Is it possible to get yoga right? As yoga continues to gain traction and popularity around the world, especially within the U.S., it’s not uncommon to stand back and wonder: How did we get here?
As far back as the late 1800’s, Western audiences have been captivated by Yoga, a blend of intentional movement and spirit ritual, now one of India’s most popular cultural exports. While it will always remain crucial to honor the cultural and spiritual roots of Yoga, a practice steeped in thousands of years of Indian history, it is also important to remember that Yoga has very little to do with how it appears. A studio that relies on advertising its teaching as “authentic” is just as caught up in the commodification as any other studio, because the truth is: “Traditional Yoga” is a myth.
Despite the contemporary idea that yoga asanas, as we practice them, date back thousands of years ago, most of them only came into being within the last 150 years. These modern yoga postures are derived from the Nāth succession of Hatha yogis. At the time, these practitioners were outcasts, magicians and bhikshu whom the dominant yoga community frowned upon. Hatha, a word uniting the wilful, energetic force of ha (sun) and the calming energy of tha (moon), finds its earliest philosophical schema in the Śaiva Tantras. However, it was not until the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, a 14th century manual, that the instructions for 15 asanas were described. However, these were mostly seated postures– there were no sun salutations or standing poses. Subsequent centuries later, in the Gheranda Samhita, still only 32 poses are elucidated, with no mention at all of standing poses or vinyasa flows sprinkled within most current yoga classes. Perhaps even more shocking is the fact that Sun Salutations, the blueprint of most present-day instruction, are similarly missing from these classical yoga primers. From the Rigveda, a tome of Vedic sanskrit hymns now 3,500 years old, to Patanjali’s sutras, to the Upanishads, and later the errant teacher Gorakhnath, yoga had evolved as a primarily spiritual practice, emphasizing the movement of energy in the invisible, subtle body. After the discovery, however, of the Sritattvanidhi, a 19th-century compendium of 122 illustrated asanas, another understanding of yoga slowly began to unfold.
The Sritattvanidhi was comissioned by the Maharaja of Mysore, Krishnaraja Wodeyar III, and contains an impressive variety of poses, from a myriad of yogic lineages. Bethaks, a type of squat done as a warm-up for Kusti, a form of Indian wrestling, is included in the text, but you may know it as a version of Utkatasana, or chair pose. This, as well as danda push-ups, which later morphed into Chaturanga Dandasana, are vital parts of today’s Surya Namaskar (Sun Salutations). A few decades after Sritattvanidhi was published, Vivekananda wrote Raja Yoga, which sought to interpret Patanjali’s yoga sutras for a Western audience. Vivekananda’s introduction garnered awareness and interest in yoga from a more abstract, spiritual standpoint, which then paved the way for Krishnamacharya, known as “The Father of Modern Yoga” to give the information physical shape and sequence.
The Palace of Mysore, an enduringly important nexus of yoga, witnessed another yoga revival at the beginning of the 1930’s. The Maharaja employed Niels Ebbesen Bukh, a Danish gymnastics coach to instruct the princes of the royal family, which then led to the creation of the Palace’s own yoga manual, the Vyayama Dipika. Combining both indigenous Indian calisthenics and the athleticism of Western gymnastics, yoga was primed for a major evolution in physical praxis. The Maharaja then endorsed a yoga school, appointing Krishnamacharya to manage it. When Krishnamacharya arrived, he found his shala had previously been used as a practice space for gymnastics. The hall, replete with wall ropes and other gymnastic equipment, was quickly adapted to his own innovative, yogic purposes. Krishnamacharya was able to meld his own accrued travel insight with the yoga transformation happening at Mysore. Having spent years in Tibet with one of the few Hatha masters still living, he learned the power in synchronizing breath and movement. Vinyasa Krama, which built on the ancient philosophy that any movement can inspire a meditative state, further revolutionized yoga, through its subtle integration of postural and pranic alignment.
Demonstration by Krishnamacharya at Mysore - KYM Archives.
With access to the Palace’s densely varied, ancient library, and stipends from the royal family, Krishnamacharya and his students, which included B.K.S Inyegar and Pattabhi Jois, could travel around India exhibiting this fusion of modern athleticism and Vedic wisdom. An incredible revival of yoga spread throughout the country; thus did yoga as we know it begin to develop. The now well-known successors to Krishnamacharya’s teaching, Iyengar and Jois, further cemented modern yoga’s place in the Western canon of fitness, continuing to enhance poses and sequences which focused on precise, physical alignment. In short, Inyegar, Ashtanga, Bikram, Anusara, and Sivananda yoga are all styles developed within the 20th century - explained in our video here. It’s something of a delightfully ironic reminder, to yogis all over, of the illusions we hold to be truths. In moving through poses we perceive as Gospel straight from the Indus Valley, we come to recognize that divergence from tradition does not mean a flawed or ingenuine practice. There is no one, “true” tradition that in following, we prove a status as real yogis. Yoga’s history, which meanders and winds through lineages, countries, and texts, reflects a belief that is creative, adaptive, and open to change. And so, the pendulum continues to swing, from progressive to change-averse, as yoga continues its millenia-long evolution. The practices evolve, and so do the practitioners, and yet, nothing else is quite as capable of standing in as a better reference point than our own breath, and the movement of our own bodies.
