Yoga is shaping up to be India’s greatest gift to the world. A recent session of UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Committee for Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in Ethiopia, all 24 members unanimously voted to support India’s proposal to add yoga to the list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. In the world’s current rapid pace, our united purpose gets lost in the set up where each individual is raised purposely as a consumer and who’s daily energy, albeit ironically, is purposely consumed. Life is a journey to seek purpose, in union with the rhythm of the world. Yoga is a method of discipline that, through practice, will enable its practitioner to find one’s correct tone.

As a yogini with an academic background in Early Years Education and Developmental Psychology, I don’t find it surprising that Yoga finds a parallel journey of validation with science.

In science, there is an ongoing discussion about string theory, where the elementary particles we observe in particle accelerators could be thought of as the “musical notes” or excitation modes of elementary strings.

In string theory, as in guitar playing, the string must be stretched under tension in order to become excited. However, the strings in string theory are floating in space/time, they aren’t tied down to a guitar. Nonetheless, they have tension. Yoga is a tool to find your rhythm, in harmony with the world.

This is the reason why a yogi or yogini takes time to find in them the right breathing pattern and then proceed to pursue yoga poses or asana. This is also the reason why in its 5000-year-old rich history, it has branched out or evolved into customary and adaptive versions. As a personal journey, it begins with Namaste or bowing to you, as it essentially teaches one to bend in humility and find a center. Its root, its Sanskrit origin remains the same.

Yoga was first mentioned in the oldest sacred texts, the Rig Veda. The beginnings of Yoga were developed by The Vedas which were a collection of texts containing songs, mantras, and rituals to be used by Brahmans, the Vedic priests, an Indus-Sarasvati civilization in Northern India over 5,000 years ago. Yoga was slowly refined and developed by the Brahmans and Rishis (mystic seers) who documented their practices and beliefs in the Upanishads, a huge work containing over 200 scriptures. The most renowned of the Yogic scriptures is the Bhagavad-Gîtâ, composed around 500 B.C.E. In Krishna’s Bhagavad Gita, the great yogi warrior and Godhead of the Indian bhakti movement, emphasizes that yoga is union, love, the source of all things:

He who is rooted in oneness
realizes that I am
in every being, wherever
he goes, he remains in me.
When he sees all beings as equal
in suffering or in joy
because they are like himself,
that man has grown perfect in yoga.

(BG 6.29-32)

The Upanishads took the idea of ritual sacrifice from the Vedas and internalized it, teaching the sacrifice of the ego through self-knowledge, action (karma yoga) and wisdom (jnana yoga).

Classical Yoga

In the pre-classical stage, yoga was understandably a mix of various ideas that may seem unsophisticated set of beliefs and techniques that often conflicted and contradicted each other. The Classical period is defined by Patanjali’s Yoga-Sûtras, the first systematic presentation of yoga. Sutra, after all, means thread or framework, with which it is based. Written sometime in the second century, this text describes the path of Raja Yoga, often called “classical yoga”. Patanjali organized the practice of yoga into an “eight-limbed path” containing the steps and stages towards obtaining Samadhi or enlightenment. Patanjali is often considered the father of yoga and his Yoga-Sûtras still strongly influence most styles of modern yoga.

Post-Classical Yoga

Inherent to yoga culture to learn and adapt, which is why a few centuries after Patanjali, yoga masters created a system of practices designed to rejuvenate the body and prolong life. They set aside the teachings of the ancient Vedas and embraced the physical body as the means to achieve enlightenment. This led to Tantra Yoga which used radical techniques to cleanse the body and mind to break the knots that bind us to our physical existence. It explored the connections of physical-spiritual in the body. These practices gave birth to what we see as the prevailing yoga in the West, the Hatha Yoga. Hatha refers to the practice of physical yoga postures, meaning your Ashtanga, Vinyasa, Iyengar, and Power Yoga classes are all Hatha Yoga. The word “hatha” can be translated two ways: as “willful” or “forceful,” or the yoga of activity, and as “sun” (ha) and “moon” (tha), the yoga of balance. Hatha practices are designed to align and calm your body, mind, and spirit in preparation for meditation.

Yoga masters started to migrate to the West, attracting attention and new followers by the late 1800s and early 1900s. One famous event happened at the 1893 Parliament of Religions in Chicago when Swami Vivekananda gave thought-provoking lectures on yoga and the universality of the world’s religions. In the 1920s and 30s, Hatha Yoga was strongly promoted in India with the work of T. Krishnamacharya, Swami Sivananda and other yogis practicing Hatha Yoga. Krishnamacharya opened the first Hatha Yoga school in Mysore in 1924 and in 1936 Sivananda founded the Divine Life Society on the banks of the holy Ganges River. Krishnamacharya produced three students that would continue his legacy and increase the popularity of Hatha Yoga: B.K.S. Iyengar, T.K.V. Desikachar, and Pattabhi Jois. Sivananda was a prolific author, writing over 200 books on yoga, and established nine ashrams and numerous yoga centers located around the world.

The importation of yoga to the West still continued at a trickle until it reached Hollywood in 1947 when Indra Devi opened her yoga studio. Since then, many more western and Indian teachers have become pioneers, popularizing hatha yoga and gaining millions of followers. Hatha Yoga now has many different schools or styles, all emphasizing the many different aspects of the practice.

Yoga had a more natural migration to the UK with the cultural exchange between a colony and colonizer. This is witnessed more pronouncedly when the Beatles found some of life’s answers through the Hare Krishna Mantra. George Harrison made bhakti yoga his personal choice for finding his center even after the dissolution of the world’s most popular group. The influence encompasses to the present with the likes of David Beckham Liz Hurley, Kate Moss, Russel Brand and Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle to name a few. Also, the invention of yoga mats in the 1990s made an introduction to yoga more focused on the meditation and less in consideration of some bone to floor discomfort. This is evidence that yogis are an intricate part of a worldwide culture, whose demands are addressed along with the introduction of technology.

In a recent study made by Lancaster and Cambridge University, Yoga is cited as one of the top 15 most popular words in the UK along with current social media products like Facebook and Twitter, proving that the practice is still relevant, if not more so. As UNESCO stated: “Based on unifying the mind with the body and soul to allow for greater mental, spiritual and physical wellbeing, the values of yoga form a major part of the community’s ethos. Yoga consists of a series of poses, meditation, controlled breathing, word chanting and other techniques designed to help individuals build self-realization, ease any suffering they may be experiencing and allow for a state of liberation. It is practised by the young and old without discriminating against gender, class or religion and has also become popular in other parts of the world. Traditionally, yoga was transmitted using the Guru-Shishya model (master-pupil) with yoga gurus as the main custodians of associated knowledge and skills. Nowadays, yoga ashrams or hermitages provide enthusiasts with additional opportunities to learn about the traditional practice, as well as schools, universities, community centres, and social media.”

Breathe it in.