Yoga for Boys and Girls

In preparation for your first Bikram experience, I'll post a little yoga information for you guys. As you all know, yoga is at least four thousand years old and probably is the precursor to all the eastern martial arts. The origins appear to be documented from around the time of the Vedic civilization (c. 1500 BCE). Explicit examples of yoga philosophy appear to begin in the Upanishads texts that are part of the Vedas, the core of historical Hinduism. There may have been some mixing of western (barbarian) philosophies that helped generate these ideas. While these texts mention elements that are recognizable as the precursors to modern yoga, they are part of a broader cultural and philosophical (/religious) development in the indian subcontinent. Breath control, meditation and mantras are all described. Further there are notions of Karma (the path of action or service) and renunciation ('letting go' or the rejection of desire).

I'll not digress too much into the origins of Buddhism (fascinating), the adoptions of yoga and similar exorcises by monks, the spread across china with its fascinating cultural interchange followed by the the migration across the sea of Japan and the integration there with Shinto. The origin of modern martial arts developed as an outgrowth of these exercises that the monks practiced. (If you were a monk you were an easy target for brigands and thieves. The exercises took on defensive applications, though the principles of breath control, discipline and mind over body extend directly from the yoga practices. This complimentarily still exists to this day.) Note that there were multiple waves of influence but the first wave that has been linked to the propagation of yoga like practices and buddhism into china was c. 464 CE.

The Bhagavad Gita is one of the most famous pre-classical yoga texts and is a very complete description of yoga at that time. (Note the yoga, like the term 'kung fu' is a broad term.) This text is included in the spread of buddhism across asia. This text does not include the slightly more exotic bits from the Vedic texts, which included such wonders as human sacrifice. The first systematization of yoga was probably by Patanjali in the Yoga Sutra. Interestingly, by this time three or four systems of yoga existed side by side (for most of the first millennium CE). This parallels the coexistence of buddhism and hinduism, buddhism and confucianism, buddhism and shinto. It seams that accepting multiple belief or philosophical systems has been easier in the east than the west. Tantra Yoga arrived around the forth century CE and rejected the traditions based in the Vedas texts. Trantric yoga was centered on devotion, primarily to the Goddess. This tradition included far more respect for women, the notion that liberation was attained through the body, male and female energies and was seen as a partial split from the traditional branch. (Only one path of the tantra was what many of us as 'tantric' including the sex, the other path was opposed to it. Those in favor suggested that it was impossible to know what you were transcending until you'd experienced it.)

Modern yoga (as we in the west think of it) is Hatha Yoga. Hatha includes the physical postures that we we think of today. Like the tantrics, hatha believes in polarities (hot/cold, male/female, etc) as potentially embodied in the names elements 'ha-tha' meaning 'sun'-'moon'. (But according to at least one source, 'hatha' means 'force' and the earlier analysis is an incorrect post-hoc derivation.) Unfortunately, hatha yogis had less interest in the sexual union of opposites--clearly an oversight on their part. Through physical effort hatha hopes to transform the body into a define body to help achieve enlightenment. As such, hatha yogis worked to understand the body. We, in the west, think primarily of yoga as the the asanas, or physical poses. But, yoga historically has been a full philosophical and religious world view. (Note that some references to eastern ideas have filtered into the west from the time of the Greeks.) Some of the philosophical ideas have also filtered trough, especially during the late nineteenth century with the transcendentalists and in the '50s and '60s when many people interested in exploring the spiritual aspects went to India to study. Our modern yoga practice probably owes most to Tirumalai Krishnamacharya who championed the use of asanas in the 1930s and is the god-father of vinyasa. One of the modern forms, Iyengar, was developed by B.K.S. Iyengar who was a disciple of T. Krishnamacharya. Bikram Choudhury developed a specific sequences of asanas Bikram Yoga and specified that his yoga should be practiced in hot, humid rooms.

We're going to do Bikram yoga. As it's most likely to be seen as potentially hard (or dangerous) and therefor tempting to Brian. Of course, we should work our way up to this yoga, Acro Yoga, which clearly could be even more dangerous. Acro yoga combines yoga techniques and discipline with acrobatics and circus elements (pyramids, etc). We'll practice bikram at our local Bikram studio sometime soon.

For more on the history of yoga see: Yoga Journal: A history of yoga or wikipedia.

Sometime I'll write a post on the wave of spreading influence of Indian philosophy and practices across China and Japan and the cultural interactions that produced the varieties of Buddhism and martial arts that we see today. The cross pollination is very interesting.