What is Yoga?

Yoga is more than just stretching and bending. It does more than improve your strength and flexibility. I know a lot of people see it as just a mild form of physical exercise, best suited to middle-aged middle-class women. When my friends decided to try Yoga, they told me it was just a room full of old ladies farting while they tried to touch their toes. The idea of going to a gym, wearing spandex, and paying upwards of £5 to sit in a room full of fart did not appeal to me. I wasn't particularly concerned about my physical strength or flexibility anyway. It was years later that I started to care about my health and fitness, particularly because of the effects that has on mental wellbeing. At first, I tried going to the gym and using the equipment there. It wasn't much fun. I tried circuit training, which means running around a room with a bunch of other people while one guy shouts out what to do. That was just exhausting. I even tried zumba, which I just couldn't keep up with! Then mum asked me if I'd like to go to a Yoga class with her. I decided to give it a go.

We came to a beautiful church hall, a wooden structure with windows on three sides and mirrors on the other. A small, slightly plump, slightly older, middle-class lady lead the class, which consisted mainly of middle-aged middle-class women. We rolled out our mats and sat down on the floor to await her instruction. She put her hands together and greeted the class with a "namaste", which basically means "greetings" although there is a deeper subtext to it. She opened a book about Yoga and began to read us one of her favourite chapters, which she then asked us our thoughts on. We then began with breathing exercises and went on to practice various postures. She used a lot of Sanskrit words which I didn't understand. The class ended with a final meditation, during which we were advised to use blankets to keep warm. This general pattern was repeated for each weekly class, and gradually, I started to learn the Sanskrit terms and what Yoga was actually about.

The word "yoga" can be translated as "to join" or "to unite". It is about gaining a sense of connection. Yoga is the point of contact between you and something greater than yourself; the Supreme, the Ultimate Reality, the Divine, Truth, Oneness. Yoga is a way of life, and incorporates its own epistemology, metaphysics, ethical practices, systematic exercises and self-development techniques.  Early references to practices that later became part of Yoga, are made in Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, composed around 900-700 BCE. The Sanskrit term Upanishad translates as "sitting at the foot/feet of", referring to the student sitting down near the teacher while receiving their wisdom. The authorship of most Upanishads is uncertain and unknown. Radhakrishnan states, "almost all the early literature of India was anonymous, we do not know the names of the authors of the Upanishads". The Upanishads are respected not because they are considered divinely revealed, but because they present spiritual ideas that are inspiring. The Katha Upanishad, composed around 400-300 BCE, defines Yoga as the steady control of the senses, which along with cessation of mental activity, lead to a supreme state of being. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali were compiled around 400 CE. Patanjali took material about Yoga from older traditions and combined it with his own explanatory passages to create a formal Yoga philosophy.

My Yoga teacher was trained by the British Wheel of Yoga, which was founded in 1965. She tells me that she focuses on "Hatha Yoga" which dates to the 8th century CE. Hatha Yoga synthesizes elements of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras with posture and breathing exercises to purify the physical body, which leads to purification of the mind and spirit. Hatha Yoga was responsible for the development of asanas "postures" which have become characteristic of Yoga today. Swami Vivekananda was the first teacher to actively advocate and disseminate aspects of Yoga to a western audience, touring Europe and the United States in the 1890s. Yoga gained widespread appeal in the 1960s, thanks to popular teachers such as B.K.S. Iyengar (1918-2014), K. Pattabhi Jois (1915-2009), Swami Vishnu-devananda (1927-1993), and Swami Satchidananda (1914-2002). In an attempt to broaden its appeal, many of the spiritual and philosophical aspects were abandoned in the 1980s, and Yoga was pushed as a purely physical exercise. I think this was partly a response to the Christian demonization of Yoga as a dangerous cult. People were scared of Yoga, and it needed to be watered down and cleansed of Hindu religious elements. Advertised by slender young women in tight clothing, Yoga became a harmless exercise regime which promised to make you slim, fit, and bendy. Without its spiritual teachings, Yoga became all about personal vanity and sex appeal. That isn't Yoga at all.

The stretching and bending is just a small part of Yoga. The idea is that we pursue a spiritual path without neglecting the body. Yoga teaches us that caring for our body has a direct effect on mental health, and this helps us to achieve a higher level of consciousness. We are taught to think about what we eat, to consider the way it affects our mood and our concentration levels. We are taught to overcome physical aches and pains, cravings and desires. We learn how to overcome consumerism, to live a more simple life. Yoga says to give up the materialistic lifestyle, and to go out to the wilderness, to live in peaceful solitude. It teaches us to quiet the mind, to let our worries and troubles drift far away from us. Attaining inner peace, we connect to something much greater than us, we find wholeness, we become One with All. That is Yoga.