Conor’s Origins of Yoga

Growing up in my family, we were nominally Christians. We celebrated Christmas and Easter but many of those years without even visiting a church. As a little boy, I was pretty confused about what Santa had to do with the birth of a divine baby, or what the Easter Bunny had to do with a very intense form of ancient Roman execution. But when I was ten, my parents took me to a new church called Self-Realization Fellowship. When we walked in, I could tell it was different. On the altar were pictures of the man who founded the Fellowship, Paramhansa Yogananda, and the lineage of his teachers Sri Yukteswar, Lahiri Mahasaya, and Mahavatar Babaji. This line-up ended with a depiction of Krishna, the most beautiful person I had ever seen, and someone more familiar, Jesus Christ. 

Paramhansa Yogananda’s teacher, Sri Yukteswar, had a Ph.D in Comparative Religion, and taught his disciples not only in their own tradition of Vedantic Yoga, but also in the other traditions of the world. When Yogananda came to the United States in the 1930s, he couched the message of Vedanta within the ministry of Jesus to make it more accessible to an American audience. One of the basic teachings being that the second coming is that of Christ Consciousness within ourselves and the Sermon on the Mount frequently taught in a way that lent itself towards the principles of wisdom found in yoga, the Vedas and the Upanishads. 

It was a bright and cool spring day in Sacramento, with flowers blooming everywhere and in particular abundance as we walked up to the church near Sutter’s Fort. I remember how warmly we were greeted, and the smell of sandalwood, and that after a few minutes of sitting in the pews with my parents, the children were invited into the Sunday school. This is where I received a gift that would direct the course of my entire life. It was here I got my first instruction in meditation, the technique I still use when I’m not consciously working on other skills, and the one I teach to beginners or groups of mixed levels. My parents and I continued to attend SRF for a little more than a year, and I began meditating on my own as a regular practice. I even had a comic book depicting the life of Yogananda. 

My parents got divorced when I was twelve and they each defaulted to the traditions of their upbringing, but my own sense of spirituality had been altered. Before learning meditation, I thought prayer was to ask God for favors, but I now understood that God was something much larger and more mysterious, had something to do with our relationships to one another, and how successfully we brought peace into our own corners of the world. I was beginning to get the inkling that religions, or as I now prefer to say Wisdom Traditions, all had variations of expression and that within each was a thread that affirmed we are all connected and to treat other people kindly no matter what. I also had an early and strong suspicion of anyone who claimed that there was only one way and that it happened to be their own.  

Throughout the 20th century the study of Yoga was primarily associated with meditation and breathwork. The physical postures, the asana, were taught less frequently and often in more special settings. No one at SRF even mentioned asana to me until I suffered a knee injury and one of the adults suggested I find a class. This coincided with a larger cultural shift toward yoga as a kind of calisthenics, excellent for using your own bodyweight to get fit. At Borders Bookstores everywhere you could find yoga DVDs alongside bright blue mats and yoga blocks. Madonna was doing Vrksasana in a Gap commercial and would later roll around in Dhanurasana while Britney Spears looked on. 

For many people dissatisfied with their traditional upbringing, practicing asana became a way to find a community of like-minded people, and to affirm their real world experience as lived in their own nervous systems and bodies. Classes were typically 90 minutes which left plenty of time for a long Savasana as well as instruction in meditation. These integral parts of a holistic yoga practice have since been somewhat discarded in favor of shorter classes (and attention spans). 

Another shift began to take place in the mid 2000s, illustrated when a small but respected pair of yoga studios, known as Yoga Works, were bought by the investment group Highland Capital Partners. By 2007, the corporation had raised over 13 million dollars (more like 20 million today given inflation) and acquired 20 more studios by 2008. When Yoga Works went public in 2017 it had 50 studios. Clearly, yoga was being recognized as a profitable industry, and like all things in capitalism, needed to appeal to a larger market. As a result, the demand for higher intensity yoga, coupled with the very real benefits of movement and focus on breathing, took up larger and larger portions of class, leaving less room for the cultural context from which yoga comes, and the social implications of its philosophy. 

Today, new offerings of yoga are continually popping up. Yoga sculpt, goat yoga, and even beer yoga classes make their appearance, but few people know the history of how important yoga and more specifically the Bhagavad Gita were to Mahatma Gandhi, and how he used these principles to rally and unify the oppressed Indian people and non-violently resist British colonialism in that country. Yoga doesn’t have to be something new to be appealing. In fact many of these new iterations dilute and misrepresent Yoga’s origins. 

So, what is yoga? In the Yoga Sutra, Sri Pantañjali defines yoga as “bringing thoughtwaves into stillness”. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna defines yoga as “skill in action”. The word yoga itself comes from the Sanskrit word, yuj, meaning “to bring together” and refers to the bringing together of purusha and prakriti, what we might call spirit and nature. 

While there are many different schools and traditions within yoga, at its heart lies the cultivation of loving-kindness, of service to others, and living a life guided by a deep sense of value in the face of hardship, opposition, and power. In a time where the idea of social responsibility and even empathy is regarded by our elected leaders as weakness, and hateful speech and acts of violence take up more and more of our social discourse, there is a lot to be learned from the history, context, and practice of yoga.

The true practice of yoga goes beyond the healing and regeneration of our internal world. As we learn in texts like the Gita and the Ramayana, the fruits of yoga practice are evident when we are able to keep our internal world calm while we work for justice and love in the outer world according to our values, no matter what is thrown at us.

To further explore these topics together, I will be leading a class on Thursdays at 7:30pm called Study Hall :: Yoga as Philosophy, Poetry & Practice, hope you join me!