Who invented yoga poses

Did classic postures truly speak to their needs, their bodies, and to the stresses that faced them? My own inner conflict peaked about 10 years ago when I could no longer justify teaching a set sequence of postures. One of the precepts of yoga is aparigraha , or non-attachment. Yoga encourages us to not be so attached to physical or mental constructs of ourselves. What Singleton has now unearthed is the possibility of letting go of the historical construct of yoga postures.

This construct was once a long mirror illuminating a tradition tracking back through the millennia. It was a form used equally by frauds and geniuses to imbue their inventions with the aura of authority.

All three studied in Mysore under Tirumalai Krishnamacharya. In a nutshell, it is the focus on asana s, or postures. The revival The earliest extant texts on yoga are the Yoga Sutras , a group of aphorisms composed around AD and ascribed to Patanjali. There were a number of commentaries written on the Yoga Sutras in the centuries after their composition, but by around the 13th century, the text fell into disuse. It was revived in the 19th century by the likes of Madame Blavatsky and Swami Vivekananda.

The Yoga Sutras are concerned with transcendence through meditation. Asanas , or postures, are treated only briefly, in a discourse about appropriate ways to sit while meditating. These basic asana s are familiar from Hindu and Buddhist iconography. Around the 14th century, a from of yoga developed out of Tantric practice that came to be called Hatha Yoga, fixated on the preservation of the physical body and the prolongation of life.

Vivekananda's view Hatha Yoga came to be associated in the popular imagination with yogis who performed austerities and contortions for money. Nearly every yoga book starts with that definition.

A little inquiry into the type of union yoga indicates reveals that yoga is an awareness of one's intimate and inherent connection to a higher power, and practices of yoga help to create the condition for this realization to arise. That's pretty much it. If we don't automatically have a sustained experience of yoga -- the awareness of ourselves as inherently whole and complete -- then, we do certain practices to reveal that experience more readily and in a more sustained way.

There are many proven practices that help to create this condition, meditation probably being the most tried-and-true method. But, let's be honest. How many Americans are ready to sit their asses down and meditate? For, like, a long time? We are not even a culture who can sit on the floor in relative comfort.

However, we love working hard on our bodies. Sometimes to the point that it becomes an obsession. Given these proclivities, it seems natural to develop a means of practice that utilizes and initially emphasizes the body as an entry point into the deeper awareness of yoga. Hail asana. Honestly, let's not knock it or diminish it, even though it is the baby of the modern yoga culture and the brainchild of yoga innovators of recent decades. Why wouldn't it work? There's no proof it can't Otherwise, it will remain in the realm of gymnastics and aerobics.

There are no sun salutations, no downward-facing dogs or warriors. There are instructions for drawing discharged semen back into the penis, so as to overcome death, and for severing the tendon connecting the tongue to the bottom of the mouth, and lengthening it so that it can touch the forehead.

Until the twentieth century, educated Indians and Westerners alike tended to disdain the occult practices denoted by the term "hatha yoga. A central figure in this transformation was B. I met Iyengar in , at his institute in Pune, a city about a hundred miles south of Mumbai, where students from all over the world travelled to study with the revered yoga master. Iyengar sat at the head of a table in a windowless basement library surrounded by Western students bent over research and translation projects.

With his mane of white hair and intense, laughing eyes topped by bushy caterpillar brows, he seemed, in his nineties, impossibly vital, as if he had actually discovered a yogic method for cheating death. Before Iyengar found yoga, he said many times, he was a sickly boy, enervated by tropical diseases.