Re: The downside of yoga

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(Yoga practitioners) might be surprised to learn that many of the most well-known asanas and sequences they are used to performing - including "Downward Dog" and Surya Namaskar, or "Sun Salutation" - are not found in ancient texts.

Sun salutations are "now seen as integral to yoga practice" but are not found in any old texts and only started being taught around the 1930s, says Dr Jim Mallinson, a yoga history researcher and senior lecturer at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).
Popular yoga styles like Ashtanga, Iyengar and Vinyasa Flow are also modern incarnations. "We find elements of them in older texts and historical sources but also many parts of them are modern innovations in terms of yoga," he says.

Researchers believe Downward Dog actually corresponds with the Elephant Pose - references to which are first found in 18th Century texts. The posture was also traditionally used as an exercise by Indian wrestlers.
However similar postures can be found in popular physical exercise books that emerged at the beginning of the 20th Century.

Dr Mark Singleton, a senior researcher in the modern history of yoga at SOAS, says Swedish and Danish gymnastic drills were particularly influential on Indian yoga practices.

A widespread "preoccupation with natural fitness" at the turn of the 19th Century coincided with developments in photography, which allowed pictures of poses and exercises to easily spread between India and the West.

"This inevitably meant that European notions of gymnastics and bodybuilding got mixed up with Indian postures and poses along the way," he writes.

[theconversation.com]


"And what many of us know today as yoga is partially a result of this mixing."

and

What's behind the five popular yoga poses loved by the world? - BBC Radio

[www.bbc.co.uk];

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Until the 19th century, yoga was almost exclusively the practice of ascetic Indian holy men aspiring to spiritual liberation through techniques such as meditation and sensory withdrawal.


But this changed in the early 20th century when a worldwide body fitness craze, fuelled by illustrated magazines, led to an unprecedented mash-up of European health and strength regimes with Indian physical culture traditions.

Scandinavian gymnastic keep fit drills were introduced in schools and military training throughout India. European bodybuilders commanded huge audiences when they toured the subcontinent and their techniques were enthusiastically adopted. During the 1920s and '30s, (a period of growing Indian nationalism) a new generation of Indian fitness enthusiasts began to re-invent yoga as a modern, homegrown system for health and strength which could be practised by ordinary people.

In the process, these yoga innovators adopted many physical postures and techniques that had previously not been part of traditional yoga practice. The modern styles of yoga that are so well known globally today such as Ashtanga, Bikram, and Iyengar all emerged from these tangled multicultural roots.