Showing posts with label yoga history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label yoga history. Show all posts

Practicing Yoga for Your Health

11:39 | Labels: , , , , , ,

by Nina

Hygeia, Goddess of Health by Peter Paul Rubens
One of the reasons, I wrote about body image yesterday in The Body You Want—besides the fact that I was feeling a bit rant-y, I guess—is that I knew I was going to write today’s post about practicing yoga for health benefits. And I wanted to have a way to clearly distinguish between practicing yoga asanas for health benefits and practicing yoga to “get the body you want.” This topic was on my mind because we received the following question from one of our readers:

"I’m a well aged yoga practitioner in my 70’s. One of the most incongruent aspects of yoga, especially in the western world, seems to come about from the tendency of practitioners to ‘use’ yoga for achieving something physical … more flexibility, greater range of motion and on and on. In a different way, as Ram so kindly reminds us, yoga offers the means to grow spiritually. To me these two aspects of yoga … achieving a desirable state of physical being through asana and cultivating spiritual growth through meditation, mindfulness and intentional study of yoga tradition appear to be at odds with each other.

"Question: Does the tendency to ‘use’ yoga (physically) actually impede our ability to comprehend the less tangible, more subtle and deeper spiritual aspects of yoga?"

To this reader, the use of yoga to achieve something “physical” seems incongruent with cultivating spiritual growth, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. In fact, hatha yoga—the type of yoga we are all practicing when we do asanas—was originally developed as a way of fortifying the body for meditation. Hatha yogis believed that an unhealthy body or one that was in constant pain would impede the ability of the practitioner to sit for long periods of time, so various physical practices, including asana, pranayama, and cleansing practices, were introduced to support the good health of the practitioner. Here’s a quote from the Hatha Yoga Pradipka that describes the purpose of the asanas:

“The Âsanas are a means of gaining steadiness of position and help to gain success in contemplation, without any distraction of the mind. If the position be not comfortable, the slightest inconvenience will draw the mind away from the lakśya (aim), and so no peace of mind will be possible till the posture has ceased to cause pain by regular exercise.”

This why doing asana to support your health is not actually incongruent with the original aim of yoga. (But this is also why, as I said yesterday, doing asanas to improve your looks or to “get the body you want” is at odds with the true aim of yoga.)

However, the intention you bring to the your practice is essential for keeping your physical practice “yogic.” If you become obsessed with achieving good health (something you might not be able to achieve, anyway) or with any of the outward attributes that you associate with health (such as strength, flexibility, balance, and so on), then these obsessions may take over. At this point, if your practice is focused solely on the achievement of physical goals as an end in themselves, then you’ve lost your way. And surely an obsession with achieving perfect health is no way to find peace of mind, because, of course, you will ultimately fail.

So how can you practice for health without getting sidetracked by focusing on physical achievements? For me, the answer is in a text that is much older than the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, the Bhagavad Gita. The important message of the Gita, which Krishna explains several different ways to Arjuna, is that achieve equanimity you must surrender the fruits of your actions:

"Set thy heart upon thy work, but never on its reward.
Work not for a reward; but never cease to do thy work.
Do thy work in the peace of Yoga and, free from selfish desires, be not moved in success or failure.
Yoga is evenness of mind—a peace that is ever the same."

In fact, in the very early days of the blog, we wrote some posts What We Need to Practice and Acceptance, Active Engagement, and the Bhagavad Gita that espoused this very philosophy as a way to achieve peace of mind as you practiced yoga for healthy aging. I wrote back then that daily yoga practice is no quick fix, and results are never guaranteed, because this is real life, people. So for your peace of mind, at the same time that you work toward staying healthy, you should try to let go of all thoughts of success or failure and simply focus on your practice. Then no matter what happens, you’ll be prepared to handle it. And this combination active engagement and acceptance is the yogic approach to practicing asana for your health.

Additionally, when you perform your asanas with this intention, what you do in the yoga room becomes “practice” for your life outside the yoga room. For this same yogic approach outside the yoga room allows you to cultivate equanimity in your daily life. No matter what work we have to do, whether it is raising children, going to a 9 to 5 job, being politically active, or helping a dying family member, practicing acceptance along with active engagement allows us to do what we need to do and be at peace with the results.

“In this wisdom, a man goes beyond what is well done and what is not well done.
Go thou therefore to wisdom:
Yoga is wisdom in work.” —Bhagavad Gita, trans. Juan Mascaro

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What is Yoga?

12:44 | Labels: , ,

by Nina

Is it possible that we’ve been blogging for two and a half years about yoga without ever defining what yoga is? Well, yes, because the problem is, it’s a totally daunting task! How do you distill thousands of years of yoga history into a few simple paragraphs? But it’s actually an important thing to do because there really is so much confusion about what yoga is, especially in the West, that unless we say what we mean, it can lead to a lot of confusion.

After all, yoga means a lot of different things to different people. And for many Americans—including doctors who recommend yoga to their patients—yoga is seen only as a form of “stretching.” In fact, when I started taking yoga classes, I didn’t have a clue what was. When I was in my late twenties, I was working at a small software company and my colleagues and I decided to start an on-site exercise class. One of our co-workers said that his wife could come and teach them, so we decided to give her a go—we had no idea she was a yoga teacher! So, on the first day of class, there we all were, standing around in our exercise clothes, when the teacher asked us to start by taking “Mountain pose,” with our big toes together and our heels slightly apart. This was the opposite foot position from the one I was used to doing in ballet and modern dance, my previous forms of preferred exercise. And just standing that way felt so wonderful for my body, I thought, whatever this is, this is for me! My experience of falling in love with the asana practice (the practice of the physical postures) without knowing anything about the rest of the yoga is actually very common.

In fact, yoga as an exercise system is only a very small part of a much larger tradition and a very recent development in the long history of yoga. Although yoga is arguably thousands of years old, what yogis were doing back in the early days had nothing at all to do with Tree pose or Sun Salutations. Early yogis were spiritual seekers, with the aim of understanding the ultimate truths of reality. In order to pursue these goals, they developed practices, including meditation and pranayama (breath control), which would allow them to concentrate and free their minds from distraction. An early definition of yoga from the Katha Upanisad is:

“When the control of the senses is fixed, that is Yoga, so people say. For then, a person is free from distraction. Yoga is the “becoming,” and the “ceasing.”

Although the original yogis were Hindus (see Modern Yoga and Hinduism) with religious goals of achieving “union with the divine,” the yoga techniques they developed for quieting the mind were so effective and their teachings about the nature of the mind and the causes of human suffering were so profound that yoga was adopted by other religions, including Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. (And, of course, in modern times, people of many other religions—and no religion at all—also practice yoga.) Naturally as yoga spread throughout the East and among very different peoples, it evolved in a myriad of ways. Yoga was eventually codified by Patanjali in 150-200 CE in The Yoga Sutras— which we still use as a reference to this day—however, the school of yoga summarized in this work was just one of the many schools of yoga that existed during that era.

And it wasn’t until Tantra and Hatha Yoga developed (approximately 800 or 900 CE) that various physical practices, such as working with chakras and prana, and yoga postures became an essential aspect of yoga. Even then, although the Hatha Yoga Pradipika (1200 -1300 CE) mentions the existence of 84 poses (asanas), it describes only 15 by name. And the aim of practicing these postures was to allow the practitioner to be able to remain comfortably seated in meditation for long periods of time.

“The Âsanas are a means of gaining steadiness of position and help to gain success in contemplation, without any distraction of the mind. If the position be not comfortable, the slightest inconvenience will draw the mind away from the lakśya (aim), and so no peace of mind will be possible till the posture has ceased to cause pain by regular exercise.”

It was really only in the 20th century that pivotal figures such as T.K.V. Krishnamacharya and B.K.S. Iyengar developed the modern asana practice as we now know it. These teachers consciously expanded the repertoire of traditional poses—blending British and Chinese gymnastics, European fitness techniques, and Indian wrestling with classic hatha yoga postures—developed the use of yoga props, with the aim of making yoga accessible to ordinary people, and adapted yoga for treating medical conditions. (If you’re disappointed that the modern asana practice was essentially invented in the early twentieth century, take a moment to acknowledge what geniuses those teachers were—the system they developed was so effective and powerful, it spread throughout the world.) During this period, for many practitioners in the west, “yoga” became completely disassociated from its spiritual aspects and the asana practice was adopted solely as an exercise system.

These days, yoga is all these things and more (trying to cover thousands of years of yoga history in a few paragraphs means simplifying quite a bit to put it mildly). As Edwin Bryant says, “Yoga is thus best understood as a cluster of techniques, some more or less systematized, that pervaded the landscape of ancient India.” So even though I don’t have a one-sentence definition I can use with authority to say what yoga is, we here at YFHA clearly have a very rich tradition to draw on.

Since this is a how-to blog about using yoga techniques to foster healthy aging, we’ve selected just a subset of those yoga techniques to focus on. These techniques are the ones that we believe are most valuable (and that we ourselves practice on a regular basis).
  • Asana. Both postures that help keep your body strong and healthy and postures that provide deep physical relaxation.
  • Meditation. Different forms of meditation that provide various ways to develop concentration, quiet the mind, and learn about your habitual thought patterns.
  • Pranayama. Breath practices that are calming or energizing, and that help build concentration and focus the mind.
  • Philosophy. Yoga scriptures, including the Bhagavad Gita and the Yoga Sutras, that contain wisdom which can guide us through all phases of life.


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In Praise of Gomukhasana (Cow-Face Pose)

14:47 | Labels: , , , ,

by Nina


Because this is turning out to be the almost all-Nina week (don’t worry, all the other regulars will be back soon), I thought today I’d just share with you some more of the beautiful artwork from the current exhibit Yoga: The Art of Transformation at the Smithsonian Museum.

As I was looking through the book, I noticed something surprising to me. While most of the yoga poses we currently do in our yoga classes and in our home practices were developed during the twentieth century (see Authentic Yoga), there are several poses—mostly seated poses—that are quite old. The artwork in this exhibit that portrays yogis in action allows us to see which ones they were. Of course, there are many examples of the classic seated position that we all picture from the past, Lotus pose (Padmasana. But I also noticed how many of these works of art portrayed yogis in a seated position similar to Cow-Face pose (Gomukhasana) legs.

It just happens that this is a pose I practice frequently myself (though not as a meditation pose) because I received advice that stretching my piriformis muscle would help me regain some mobility in my right hip, and Cow-Face pose is one of the best poses for stretching this muscle. And, as it turned out, practicing this pose on a regular basis did increase my hip mobility (see How to Stretch ).
Baxter finds this pose stretches the deep hip muscles in a different way than Sukasana (Seated Crossed Legs), Padmasana (Lotus pose), Baddhakonasana (Cobbler's pose) and Firelog pose, so it can be helpful for those with tight hips who want more mobility. And Shari recommends stretching your piriformis muscle to keep your sacrum happy and healthy. So it was quite amazing for me to see what a common seated poses this for ancient yoga practitioners. And as we haven’t yet taken photographs of one of us doing the pose, I’m so pleased to have some visual examples to show you.
While most of these paintings show the practitioner sitting on the heel of the bottom foot, many of us who aren’t used to this pose, may find this uncomfortable. In that case, sit with your hips on a prop (as in the video), such as a folded blanket, and your bottom foot alongside your hip.


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Free Download of the book “Yoga: The Art of Transformation” -- NO LONGER AVAILABLE

12:30 | Labels: , , ,

by Nina

I received an early holiday gift today that I’d like to pass on to you! Some of you may have already heard about the fascinating exhibit at the Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery of Asian art called “Yoga: The Art of Transformation,” which explores the visual art of yoga. Although I do know a few people who have been able to see that exhibit in person (and I may get to when it comes to San Franciso), many of you I’m sure won’t be able to attend in person.

Update: Although the PDF was briefly available on scribd.com, it has been deleted and I have been asked not to distribute the PDF myself. Instead, to see a preview, please go to asia.si.edu.

In addition to beautiful full-color reproductions of all the images from the exhibit, the book includes essential information about the history of yoga from writers David Gordon White, Tamara I. Sears, Carl W. Ernst, James Mallinson, Joseph S. Alter, Mark Singleton, and Sita Reddy. I think it’s important for us to learn about the history of yoga because it helps dispel a lot of myths about yoga that still tend to get passed around by various yoga teachers and even yoga magazines. One of the most important messages you will take away from the exhibit and/or the book is that in the 2,500 years of yoga’s known existence, there has never been one single type of yoga.
A BBC News Magazine article I read about the exhibit (Sackler Gallery exhibit shows yoga’s complex history) quoted the curator of the exhibit as follows:

"Five years ago I did think I would find that single yoga tradition," says Debra Diamond, curator of the exhibition Yoga: The Art of Transformation at the Smithsonian's Sackler Gallery of Asian Art.

"But yoga constantly transformed and developed over time. Although there are a couple of main goals, there's nothing that shows up in every single yoga path.

"For some traditions it was heightened consciousness and an end to suffering, a way to get out of the cycle of birth, death and re-birth that is so painful. But for other yoga traditions some of the goals were things like supernatural powers and the ability to control other people."

A dramatic example of this is the painting that shows two different factions of yogis at war:


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