A Step-by-Step Guide to yoga

It's simple to understand why John Friend extremely suggests the book Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Yoga "for all genuine students of yoga." Due To The Fact That, Mark Singleton's thesis is a well researched expose of how contemporary hatha yoga, or "posture practice," as he terms it, has altered within and after the practice left India.

However the book is mainly about how yoga transformed in India itself in the last 150 years. How yoga's main, modern-day proponents-T. Krishnamacharya and his trainees, K. Patttabhi Jois and B. K. S. Iyengar-mixed their homegrown hatha yoga practices with European gymnastics.

This was how many Indian yogis managed modernity: Rather than remaining in the caverns of the Mountain range, they moved to the city and accepted the approaching European cultural patterns. They particularly welcomed its more "esoteric kinds of gymnastics," including the influential Swedish strategies of Ling (1766-1839).

Singleton utilizes the word yoga as a homonym to explain the primary objective of his thesis. That is, he emphasizes that the word yoga has numerous meanings, depending on who utilizes the term.

This emphasis is in itself a worthy enterprise for students of everything yoga; to understand and accept that your yoga might not be the very same sort of yoga as my yoga. Just, that there are numerous courses of yoga.

Because regard, John Buddy is dead-on: this is without a doubt the most comprehensive study of the culture and history of the influential yoga lineage that runs from T. Krishnamacharya's humid and hot palace studio in Mysore to Bikram's synthetically heated studio in Hollywood.

Singleton's study on "postural yoga" makes up the bulk of the book. But he also devotes some pages to outline the history of "standard" yoga, from Patanjali to the Shaiva Tantrics who, based upon much earlier yoga customs, put together the hatha yoga tradition in the center ages and penned the well-known yoga text books the Hatha Yoga Pradipika and the Geranda Samhita.

It is while doing these evaluations that Singleton enters water much hotter than a Bikram sweat. Thus I hesitate in offering Singleton a straight A for his otherwise excellent dissertation.

Singleton declares his job is solely the study of modern posture yoga. If he had actually stayed with that job alone, his book would have been great and got just accolades. However sadly, he commits the exact same blunder a lot of contemporary hatha yogis do.

All yoga designs are fine, these hatha yogis state. All homonyms are equally good and valid, they declare. Except that homonym, which the cultural relativist hatha yogis perceive as a conceited version of yoga. Why? Since its followers, the traditionalists, declare it is a much deeper, more spiritual and standard from of yoga.

This kind of ranking, thinks Singleton, is disadvantageous and a waste of time.

Georg Feuerstein disagrees. Undoubtedly the most prolific and well-respected yoga scholar outside India today, he is among those traditionalists who holds yoga to be an integral practice-a body, mind, spirit practice. So how does Feuerstein's essential yoga homonym differ from the non-integral modern posture yoga homonym provided to us by Singleton?

Simply put, Feuerstein's remarkable writings on yoga have focused on the holistic practice of yoga. On the entire shebang of practices that traditional yoga established over the past 5000 plus years: asanas, pranayama (breathing workouts), chakra (subtle energy centers), kundalini (spiritual energy), bandhas (innovative body locks), mantras, mudras (hand gestures), and so on

. For this reason, while posture yoga mainly concentrates on the physical body, on doing postures, integral yoga consists of both the physical and the subtle body and involves an entire huge selection of physical, psychological and spiritual practices rarely practiced in any of today's modern-day yoga studios.

I would not have bothered to bring all this up had it not been for the fact that Singleton mentioned Feuerstein in an important light in his book's "Concluding Reflections." To put it simply, it is strategically important for Singleton to critique Feuerstein's analysis of yoga, a type of yoga which happens to basically coincide with my own.

Singleton writes: "For some, such as very popular yoga scholar Georg Feuerstein, the contemporary fascination with postural yoga can only be a perversion of the genuine yoga of tradition." Then Singleton quotes Feuerstein, who composes that when yoga reached Western coasts it "was gradually stripped of its spiritual orientation and renovated into fitness training."

Singleton then properly mentions that yoga had already started this physical fitness change in India. He likewise properly explains that physical fitness yoga is not apposed to any "spiritual" business of yoga. However that is not exactly Feuerstein's point: he merely explains how the workout part of modern yoga does not have a deep "spiritual orientation." And that is a vital difference.

Then Singleton exclaims that Feuerstein's assertions misses out on the "deeply spiritual orientation of some modern bodybuilding and women's fitness training in the harmonial gymnastics tradition."

While I believe I am rather clear about what Feuerstein indicates by "deeply spiritual," I am still not exactly sure what Singleton suggests by it from simply checking out Yoga Body. And that makes an intelligent contrast difficult. Thus why did Singleton bring this up in his concluding arguments in a book devoted to physical postures? Definitely to make a point.

Considering that he did make a point about it, I wish to respond.

According to Feuerstein, the objective of yoga is enlightenment (Samadhi), not physical conditioning, not even spiritual physical conditioning. Not a better, slimmer physique, but a better opportunity at spiritual liberation.

For him, yoga is primarily a spiritual practice involving deep postures, deep study and deep meditation. Even though postures are an integral part of standard yoga, knowledge is possible even without the practice of posture yoga, indisputably shown by such sages as Ananda Mai Ma, Ramana Maharishi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, and others.

The broader question about the objective of yoga, from the point of view of traditional yoga is this: is it possible to obtain enlightenment through the practice of physical fitness yoga alone? The answer: Not very simple. Not even likely. Not even by practicing the sort of fitness yoga Singleton claims is "spiritual.".

According to important yoga, the body is the very first and external layer of the mind. Knowledge, however, takes place in and beyond the 5th and innermost layer of the subtle body, or kosa, not in the physical body. Thus, from this yoga specific point of view of yoga, physical fitness yoga has particular limits, merely due to the fact that it can not alone provide the preferred outcomes.

Similarily, Feuerstein and all us other traditionalists (oh, those darn labels!) are just saying that if your goal is knowledge, then fitness yoga most likely will not suffice. You can base on your head and do power yoga from dawn to midnight, but you still will not be informed.

Thus, they created sitting yoga postures (padmasana, siddhasana, viirasana, etc) for such particular purposes. Certainly, they spent more time sitting still in meditation over moving about doing postures, as it was the sitting practices which induced the preferred trance states of knowledge, or Samadhi.

In other words, you can be enlightened without ever practicing the varied hatha postures, however you probably won't get enlightened by simply practicing these postures alone, no matter how "spiritual" those postures are.

These are the type of layered insights and viewpoints I sorely missed out on while checking out Yoga Body. Hence his criticism of Feuerstein appears rather shallow and kneejerk.

Singleton's sole focus on describing the physical practice and history of contemporary yoga is extensive, probably rather precise, and rather impressive, however his insistence that there are "deeply spiritual" elements of modern-day gymnastics and posture yoga misses out on a crucial point about yoga. Specifically, that our bodies are just as spiritual as we are, from that space in our hearts, deep within and beyond the body.

Yoga Body thus misses out on a critical point a lot of us have the right to claim, and without having to be criticized for being conceited or mean-minded: that yoga is mostly a holistic practice, in which the physical body is seen as the very first layer of a series of rising and all-embracing layers of being-from body to mind to spirit. Which eventually, even the body is the residence place of Spirit. In sum, the body is the spiritual temple of Spirit.

And where does this yoga perspective hail from? According to Feuerstein, "It underlies the entire Tantric tradition, notably the schools of hatha yoga, which are a spin-off of Tantrism.".

In Tantra it is clearly comprehended that the human is a three-tiered being-physical, psychological and spiritual. Thus, the Tantrics really masterfully and thoroughly established practices for all three levels of being.

From this ancient point of view, it is very rewarding to see how the more spiritual, expansive tantric and yogic practices such as hatha yoga, mantra meditation, breathing exercises, ayurveda, kirtan, and scriptural research study are significantly becoming essential features of lots of modern yoga studios.

So, to answer the question in the title of this short article. Can we have both a limber body and a sacred spirit while practicing yoga? Yes, naturally we can. Yoga is not either/or. Yoga is yes/and. The more holistic our yoga practice becomes-that is, the more spiritual practice is added to our posture practice-the more these 2 relatively opposite poles-the body and the spirit-will mix and combine. Unity was, after all, the objective of ancient Tantra.

Perhaps quickly someone will write a book about this brand-new, ever-growing homonym of global yoga? Mark Singleton's Yoga Body is not such a book. However a book about this, will we call it, neo-traditional, or holistic form of yoga would definitely be a fascinating cultural expedition.