Book Thoughts
In discourse with Alistair Shearer’s Book – The Story of Yoga – From Ancient India to the Modern West (2020)
My incentive to read Alistair Shearer’s book, ‘The Story of Yoga – From Ancient India to the Modern West’ (2020), was that I wanted to find out more about where yoga came from. I did an online course with the Oxford Institute of Hindu Studies in 2017 on ‘The Philosophy of Yoga‘ and thus was aware that it was not a straightforward path and also that yoga’s emphasis had shifted, but the picture that was drawn by Alistair Shearer was much more radical than I expected. Overwhelmingly, what is outlined here had a thoroughly sobering effect on me. It emerged that the meaning of yoga, because it at all times has been influenced and shaped by the societies it was practiced in and answered the questions and needs that a particular society posed, differed vastly over time and especially some modern expressions do not reflect at all what the notion of yoga once set out to fulfil.
In its very early beginnings, in the centuries before AD, the word yoga was used, to my understanding not always synonymously, more as a form of attitude. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, historically placed shortly before or after AD, thus present a text which aims to cultivate a state of being which allows liberation from suffering. The means to achieve this are laid out systematically in an eightfold system and the focus is undoubtedly to generate a certain state of mind.
Posture work, the exercise of the body, however, as so predominantly practised in today’s yoga studios, only started to appear in the Middle Ages, coming from a Tantric background. As presented in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, a 15th century text, the concern had shifted away from only cultivating states of mind to placing more attention on preparing and purifying the body, as an accompaniment or pre-stage to the yoga of meditation.
Of particular interest in the 20th century then is the birth of modern yoga and how this lead to the way it is practised in the West. To an extensive degree it originates in the teachings of Krishnamacharya in India during the time when he taught in the palace of the Maharaja of Mysore, in the years before India gained independence from British rule, where he educated a number of students who later disseminated the teachings of yoga in the West. Krishnamacharya’s posture work – which was only one part of his teachings – was influenced not only by the then existing ideas of yoga asana (postures) but also by exercise programmes imported from the West, rooted in gymnastics, body-building and wrestling. It answered the needs of the environment he was teaching in at the time and at the palace of Mysore. Mark Singleton, whose contribution to the history of posture yoga is discussed in Shearer’s work, summarises ‘…his [Krishnamacharya’s] teaching represents a mixture of cultural adaptation, radical innovation, and fidelity to tradition’ (Singleton (2010, p. 206)).
However, when his students i.e. Patthabi Jois, B.K.S. Iyengar, Indra Devi came over to the West it was the eclectic mixture of fitness-enhancement and promise of better health which seemingly proved to be fitting the needs of the Western society. Modern, more sedentary albeit hectic lifestyle practices, for many an ongoing shift from manual activities to more cognitive occupation, a spiritual void following the disenchantment with religion, an all-pervasive culture of self-improvement, may all have contributed to make what seemed an ancient, not particularly well understood, exotic tradition very attractive which appears to produce an athletic, flexible body, evokes more calm and also can have a spiritual appeal.
However, doubtlessly and so extensively traced and pointed out by Alistair Shearer in his book, from a practice which set out to improve moral attitudes we find ourselves now in a yoga landscape which hosts a multimillion industry promising enhanced well-being – with an emphasis on physical well-being rather than cultivating an inner attitude. And very sadly this landscape continues to generate some absurd and bizarre forms of yoga, in which students are deluded into feeding their own narcissism or even worse are exploited and even abused. This seems a long way off from where it all started.
As a yoga teacher this leaves me with a number of questions:
- What has brought me to the practice in the first place?
- What has continued to fascinate me?
- In which ways will my students benefit from my teaching?
- Why do I think it is worthwhile to teach yoga?
- How do I best stay clear from cultural appropriation, projecting my wants and needs onto a notion of yoga which I bend to my purposes ? – As I don’t want to usurp the features of a foreign and timewise distanced cultural context and apply them blindly to my own practice or teach them to others in an unenlightened way.
As much as I might long for it, yoga is not the holy grail for well-being, the holy grail is and ever was mythical and elusive. As Nietzsche said ‘There is no truth’. We are forever on a journey, forever trying, digesting, adapting, trying again. Well-being is also always achieved in a context and can’t be achieved by focussing on one aspect of life on its own. Challengingly, well-being is also dependent on communities and societies.
But, yoga works and it helps body and mind. This is the experience which brought me to yoga in the first place and continued to hold me in its spell. For me it developed into exploring philosophy, practising breathing exercises and establishing a regular meditation time. So, despite the sobering effect of ‘The Story of Yoga’ I believe that yoga provides a valuable tool which, yes, alleviates suffering.
What can a group class offer?
- Increasing body awareness
- Relaxing the mind
- Mitigate tension in the body
- Gently stretching and strengthening the body
- Learning simple, reproducible techniques which bring about balance
- Practising with others
So there are some definite, straightforward benefits and my teaching must firstly go into the direction of nourishing those. Even if I teach group classes with an emphasis on posture work maybe some students, nevertheless, might become more curious and take them as a springboard of their own yoga quest to areas like meditation and how yoga can be even more employed to channelling the mind – if they feel so inclined.
With regard to the cultural context these techniques and exercises originated in, it is clear that my knowledge of them is and can only be limited and that yoga how it is taught today and in this part of the world is very different from its origins and very specific to the society I teach it in. And this means that I have to be very careful with my language how I frame any allusions referring back to the Eastern, historical context, sign-posting that this is how I understood them.
There is a quote in the book which I very much like and which translates the original idea of liberation from suffering into a more modern, rooted and tangible frame:
‘We can move away from idealising unchallenging states of superhuman perfection and embrace a humbler and more applicable paradigm, one that sees liberation not as a deification, but as a state of fully blossomed humanity. ‘ (p.307)
There is still much to think about.
Bibliography
- Shearer, A. (2020) – The Story of Yoga – From Ancient India to the Modern West, C. Hurst & Co, (Publishers) Ltd., UK
- Singleton, M. (2010) – Yoga Body – The Origins of Modern Posture Practice – Oxford University Press, UK
April 2021
Yoga with Wiebke 