A Brief History Of Yoga: 5000 Years In 5 Minutes

Yoga, as it's commonly practiced in the west, looks very different today than it did at it's inception in India 5000 years ago. So how did we get here? Take a whirlwind tour through the historical phases and evolution of this spiritual path, from magical spells to downward facing dogs, as we trace the trajectory from ancient practice to modern phenomenon.

Transcript

Welcome.

This audio is recorded live at Power Living,

Adelaide as part of the Modern Yogi Project six week course with Tessa Leon.

So where I'd like to begin for this meeting is to go backwards,

All the way backwards.

We're in the Modern Yogi Project and here we are at this studio and here are all these teachers who teach Vinyasa and Yin Yoga and you guys who practice it.

And last week he talked about what yoga is to you but it would be interesting to go,

How did we get here?

How did yoga get here looking like this?

Because it didn't always look like this and you might not realize,

Fairly so,

That until the last couple of hundred years yoga didn't involve a physical asana practice.

It looked very different.

So what I'd like to do is talk a little bit about the history of yoga quite briefly.

I've studied a lot of this topic,

It's been part of one of my courses.

So we're going to do 5,

000 years in five minutes just to rein it in.

So yoga itself is about 5,

000 years old.

The practice dates back to northern India in an area that is known as the Indus Sarasvati civilization.

And it's Indus and Sarasvati because those were two rivers that met.

And that's Sarasvati up there and she's the goddess who's named after a great river.

And that's why she's really important and she's on our wall.

And in this period of time there was some great literature called the Vedas and the Vedas are known as revealed literature or in yoga we call it Shruti and this means it wasn't remembered but the great seers or rishis they're called had it revealed to them.

So from the Vedas and those books are like mystical hymns and spells and chants and if you try and read them they're incredibly dense to get through.

The next era from that is the Upanishads.

The Upanishads are also revealed knowledge and they're called altogether Vedanta.

That means the end of knowledge,

The end of the revealed knowledge.

After that it was just people thinking of things for themselves.

Upanishad means to go and sit near.

And the teachings were all verbal back then.

It was all told teacher to student to student to teacher.

The Upanishads are around the last thousand years before the common era and one of the main portions of the Upanishads that's really popularized is the Bhagavad Gita.

And those who do our teacher training study the Bhagavad Gita and learn a lot about this text.

And what that whole phase up to here is characterized by is a non-dual philosophy.

It's called a Dvaita Vedanta and it's this idea that we are all one.

And so the Upanishads sound like mythology and things about how to follow your purpose in life.

It's that kind of stuff.

It's not about right foot forwards warrior one yet.

Although some of the names of our yoga practice come from there.

So the way India looked at this time,

We're kind of coming close to zero of common era,

Is that the caste system was in full swing.

And most of you guys know about that,

How the society at the time believed you were born into a higher or lower caste.

And so the practices of yoga were quite ceremonial and ritualistic and they were exclusively allowed to be practiced by the Brahman caste,

The very very high caste,

Certainly not women and only people born into that place in society.

So it's at this point in India that some I guess revolutionary sects come out and Buddhism is one of those and it's meant to be spiritual practice for the people.

Because yoga was never a religion.

It existed alongside many religions like Hinduism,

Buddhism,

Jainism and others.

But it itself is a spiritual practice,

A way of seeing the world,

A cosmological vantage point if you like,

A philosophy.

So from zero idea we move into what's called the classical era of yoga and this is where the literature called the Sutras comes out.

And this is very well known,

One in particular is Patanjali's yoga sutras.

There were hundreds of different ones but this is one that most people will study.

When you first access yoga philosophy you'll hear about the eight limbs of yoga and their rules like try not to steal and tell the truth and do things like that.

It still hasn't developed into asana yet.

It's kind of a way to live,

A way to transcend and I guess the ideal is still liberation is where it's heading towards.

So then we come a little more closer to now,

We're past zero of common era and we're into the tantric period.

And so what tantra means it's not as is commonly understood,

It's just sex positions and that kind of thing.

Tantra is a whole school of philosophy that starts to look at energetic practices.

So we uncover this subtle anatomy of the body and here people start getting interested in the body as a vehicle for practice.

So this is where concepts like chakras come in and values and things like that that we've heard about.

And then this leads into Hatha yoga and Hatha yoga is kind of where we practice.

This is the sphere.

So around 13,

1400 there's a book called the Hatha yoga pradipika and it lists poses,

Poses that you do with your body and so that begins.

It lists bandhas.

You could practice here,

You know about bandhas in the modern sense.

Kriyas,

Cleansing the body,

Those kinds of practices.

And from there we branch into modern yoga.

So that's about 1900 onwards.

There was a guy called Krishna Macharya and he's known to be the,

I guess,

Grandfather of modern yoga.

He taught asana and he had two teachers,

One B.

K.

S.

A.

Yenga and one Patapi Joyce.

And some of you might know the names Iyenga yoga and Ashtanga yoga.

And those were the people who came up with those.

So Iyenga was very alignment based.

We're really in the body now.

We're looking at how we move the body with close attention and Ashtanga married movement to breath.

So a combination of those two branching out of Hatha yoga is what we do here where we're intensely interested in the physical body and the breath and the marrying of the two,

The movement.

So that's how we got here.

Hopefully it was five minutes.

So it's really interesting to know that,

That we're at this kind of current end of 5,

000 years of knowledge and wisdom and study.

And all of that stuff is leading us towards the path to self-awareness,

The path to what the yogis would call liberation from suffering or the path to realize the truth of the world that we live in.

There is the world we live in and what we perceive about the world that we live in.

And we're trying to peel back the layers to see more clearly and to understand what we perceive the world to be.

Because ultimately yoga as a philosophy could suggest that truth is relative for all of us.

So that's what we're going to start focusing on for this week.

How we perceive truth,

How we perceive the world or you could call it our condition.

Reviews

A clear explanation from the beginning till now of yoga. Thank you for the insights you gave us

🪢Njoy🪢

Very informative. Thank you

Excellent

Fascinating! Would be really interested to know more. Thank you for the insight 🙏🏽

Very interesting!!! Thanks for putting it all in perspective.

Very good thank you!

Such a lovely and thorough talk in five minutes!

So well done in 5 mins!!

Awesome Thank you for All that knowledge in 5 minutes. 🙏Many Blessings

Enjoyable information! Thank you!

Short & sweet & clear & helpful. I loved it! Thank you!

A wonderful overview of the ancient teachings of yoga 🙏💗

Very interesting!

Excellent summary in 5 minutes!

This is a very good succinct explanation. Thank you for sharing! 😊

Very interesting

Very informative! Thank you for sharing!