Facts and Fictions of Yoga Pt.1 From “A Skeptic’s Journey Through the Yoga Experience”

Fact and Fiction About Yoga
 

I firmly believed for a long time that yoga was just another one of those fad imports from India that had folks chanting oms, gazing off into space with a blank look, and doing a bunch of pretzel like contorted twists and turns. I just knew that there couldn’t be more than a relative handful of mostly health faddists, and mostly women at that, throughout the country who were into yoga. That is fiction number one about yoga.

I say number one, because like any other practice, yoga comes complete with several, if not many, fictions. I’ll zero in on the most common ones. The first is its origin. Yoga originated in India, and from the little I had read initially about it, there was constant citing of Hindu or Sanskrit admonitions and verses. So, it had to be a kind of religion. In fact, this was the source of one of the controversies that periodically makes the rounds when a right-wing, evangelical preacher rails against yoga as the anti-Christ, blasphemer of Christianity. Unfortunately, some yoga devotees feed into this ignorance by continually waving the Hindu origin of yoga as if it is antithetical to Western religious beliefs and practices.

While yoga owes a profound debt to Hinduism. It has no monopoly on the evolution of yoga. There were other players in the game. They included Buddhists, Taoists, Jains, and other religious groupings. Chants, citing verses, meditation, and physical movement are also an intimate part of their beliefs and practice. When the average person thinks of yoga, they think of those twists, bends, and stretches, that are the poses. Those poses are not exclusively Indian in origin. There have been numerous add-ons, tweaks, improvisations, and modifications to yoga over the decades. They have come from modern medicine, sports, and exercise programs. Since the British held sway over India for three centuries, the Brits had some say in yoga too. That comes in the form of British calisthenics.

When yoga took off in the U.S. there were even more tweaks to it. They have their own identifiable, branded names such as yin yoga, power yoga, hot yoga, moksha/modo, bowspring, kripalu, and restorative yoga to name a few. Yoga practitioners have gotten real creative in taking the standard stuff in yoga, breathing, meditation, and the array of poses, and changing the counts in breathing, varying the sequences and postures, and how and in what position the postures should be done in.

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