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Yoga's surprising journey




When I learned Transcendental Meditation in my early teens in the 1970s, I kept it quiet from my peers for fear of appearing weird. A decade later, when helping to found the Prison Phoenix Trust (PPT) to provide opportunities for inmates to learn yoga and meditation, the situation had not greatly improved. The work being fitfully supported within pockets of the prison service and looked upon with varying degrees of suspicion by its chaplaincy service.

Fast forward and the landscape is transformed - yoga is a multi-billion dollar industry and mindfulness is practiced in the boardroom. Happily too, the work of the PPT enjoys widespread support from the Prison Service, it appears to have entered the mainstream.

Yet too there is a legitimate concern with this explosion of interest. After all, is not yoga meant to be an exacting spiritual discipline enabling the practitioner to discover their fundamental, underlying reality as one with the Self that manifests all that is?

Not necessarily for 'yoga' has developed multiple meanings and many of its contemporary practitioners are, at best, focused on improving their sense of well-being and, at worst, shaping an improved body image in a competition driven by multiplying social pressures (as well as spending 'loads of money' on faddy 'yoga accessories')!

How has this evolved? What is yoga's story?

Telling this is the task of Alistair Shearer's erudite, informative and witty. 'The Story of Yoga: From Ancient India to the Modern West'; and, I cannot over-emphasize the grace and humor of the text as well as its seriousness of purpose.  He begins by establishing an essential distinction between 'mind yoga' and 'body yoga'. The former is a structured process of meditation and accompanying disciplines whose aim is liberation. The latter is a physical practice of movement and posture that may support the former, but may simply be a way of achieving better well-being, health and body image.

Both are thought to have ancient roots in Indian tradition but whilst the evidence for the former (mind yoga) is robust flowing out of the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Mahabharata and Patanjali the evidence for the latter before the 'middle ages' is surprisingly sparse - and indeed often, within the context of mind yoga, the body is seen as an impediment to progress on the path, rather than an aid. Shearer's account of these developments is lucid, engaging and balanced - recognizing, but never disparaging, the Indian fondness for 'myth-history' to fill in the gaps of what is often in early Indian history huge absences of record.

'Body yoga' appears to emerge in the historical record with the Nath Yogis who emerge in the 8th century CE and were to remain influential well into the 18th century. We begin to see the emergence of structured physical exercises that sustain the ability to navigate one's nervous system, build resilience and withstand (as well as understand) the fruits of meditation practice. Yet, even so, what we imagine today as a fully developed system of 'body yoga' with a comprehensive range of asanas or postures continues to be notably absent.

At this point, we find ourselves in the nineteenth century and India responding to the colonial yoke of the British. The complex phenomenon that is Indian nationalism often finds itself borrowing from its oppressor to boost its own self-confidence and resources to achieve its liberation - and remarkably the story of yoga participates in this drama too. First, because it stimulated the recovery of tradition, but like all recovered traditions this often includes creative invention; and, second because it recognizes and responds to the implied criticism of colonialism in new ways.

Witness the life of Swami Vivekananda (pictured above) who blends a recovery of a Tantric meditation tradition focused on non-dualism, with a recognition of the importance of social mission and the need for India to embrace a more robust 'manliness' that includes care for its physical well-being (and the latter ironically mirroring the British observation of the relative weakness of the Indian male and its promotion, through the YMCA and others, of gymnastics)!

This call, and others like it, for a renewed physical culture, unfolding in a series of complex interactions, both with the past, with patterns of physical culture from abroad, and genuine creativity gives birth to what we would think of as contemporary hatha yoga. Undoubtedly a product of the Indian imagination, rooted in history, but not an 'ancient system' simply handed down from a mythical past. Some of its greatest modern exponents came to yoga in this emergent context, and often, like B.K.S. Iyengar, from youthful illness or frailty that was substantially transformed by these bodily practices. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, they then tended to focus on the body in yoga, over the mind, and see yoga outside of or only weakly aligned with a spiritual purpose.

This tendency was then amplified when yoga came to the West - what interested most people, most of the time, was not an entrance to the mystical East, but a ticket to enhanced well-being and health; and, this was often how it was marketed. As Shearer points out even the propagators of 'mind yoga', such as Swami Vivekananda,  Swami Yogananda, and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi all found different framing for what they were doing in ways that would appeal to a Western audience; hence, for example, the Maharishi emphasis on relaxation, stress, and well-being in the uptake of TM as well as on scientific research into mediation's benefits.

It is a bifurcation that remains with us to this day - and one exacerbated by the reasonable desire to regulate yoga. A regulation that tends to look only at the recognizably outward aspects of practice as a criterion for the judgment of quality. Regulation of some form is probably necessary because as yoga has expanded, alongside gathering evidence of its potential benefits, it has come to a renewed concern for the possibly damaging consequences of practicing too zealously, with the wrong or inexperienced guidance. Both benefits and drawbacks are amply detailed and illustrated in Shearer's text. However, regulating an ever-expanding universe with a plethora of apparent 'yogas' - my favorite in Shearer's lively account is 'nude yoga' - will be difficult but necessary as, sadly, it is a world too that has been accumulating its own plethora of scandal - sexual, cultist and financial.

What does the future hold? It would make sense, I think, to return to Shearer's opening, the deeply helpful distinction between 'mind yoga' and 'body yoga' recognizing that the latter can be practiced in support of the former but may not be. It may come with more limited, if valuable aims, of better mental and physical health if so it ought to be judged and contextualized within those aims. However, 'mental yoga' too can act as a healthy critique of 'body yoga' excesses - the multiple ways in which 'exercise' simply becomes a way of strengthening a misplaced identification with the body, feeding the anxieties of identity rather than their calming liberation. As is often the case, the intentionality of what we do, how we frame the journey, will determine the appropriateness of the destination. Shearer's book reminds us that 'mind yoga' ought to be the master and 'body yoga' the helpful emissary of our liberation.

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