Today is International Day Of Yoga. There is a sense of dis-ease about this but on the whole it seems positive. But what is Yoga? Something which is spelt with a capital letter for a start, but apart from that, what?
The tired and tested answer to this question always seems to begin with the sentence “Yoga means ‘to join'”, and of course it does, in Sanskrit, cognate with the English word “yoke” and the Greek ζεῦγμα, in this case representing union between individual consciousness and the divine. This is where it starts to get complicated so I’m going to explain the way I understand it and summarise my history with it.
Yoga is a practice based on a fundamental aspect of the Cosmos and consists of a balance, appropriately enough, between the mental and the physical, or more accurately, practical. By one account there are seven limbs: Raja, Hatha, Karma, Jñana, Bhakti, Tantra and Mantra. This is not a definitive list as there are different versions of it and the word Yoga can have other words appended to it such as Pranayama, Kundalini and Laya. Hatha Yoga is the well-known practice of asanas, which is what many people seem to think of when they hear the word “yoga”. This is stuff like surya namaskara, padmasana, halasana, gomukhasana, cakrasana etc. Some yogis disapprove of Hatha Yoga because they think looking after the body is an obstacle to transcending it, and whereas I disagree with that I also think it demonstrates how far from Yoga the practice has come in the West. Raja Yoga is meditation, Karma practical action such as housework and the general discipline of selflessness as a route to transcendence. Jñana the word is cognate with the Greek γνῶσις and the English “know”. It’s the Yoga of knowledge in the sense of enquiry into one’s own nature beyond the ego. Bhakti Yoga is the Yoga of the emotions and devotion, exemplified by Radha and Krsna and their relationship. I see Tantra as the Yoga of self-indulgence, and to be honest I’m uncomfortable with it. it may be unfair for me to describe it in that way. Finally, Mantra Yoga is the repetition of phrases to capture their essence as a path to enlightenment. As for the others, pranayama is a collection of breathing exercises and techniques, Kundalini focusses on the ascent of the coiled energy at the base of the spine through the other cakras and Laya is the dissolution of inner being into the Cosmos via meditation. These last two aren’t really limbs, and are also very similar to each other or the same.
I started the practice of Hatha Yoga quite a long time before I should’ve done in about 1971 CE when I was four. This happened because there used to be a TV series on Sunday mornings I think. Through most of the 1970s, I was somewhat aware of Yoga and in 1978 or so I got various Yoga books out of the library and started practicing it regularly and seriously. After that, in about 1980 I bought James Hewitt’s ‘Teach Yourself Yoga’ and followed that assiduously. My mother became worried that I was pursuing it as a religious practice, as I also did things like practice the kriyas and meditation, and also at that time the London Healing Mission began its campaign against Yoga and various other practices it regarded as occult and Satanic. Because my mother was an evangelical Christian, this was quite a strong influence on my life, and the organisation was insisting that people burn all their “occult” books and beg God for forgiveness for following the ways of Satan. This to my mind at the time, not yet being Christian, was just dangerous nonsense, and actually Satanic in itself. I tried to introduce some of my friends to it, but as a young teen I was probably a bit too keen on showing off for it to be appropriate for Yoga. I didn’t go veggie at the time either, although I considered it. I was keen on the idea that it should be done as an alternative to sports in my secondary school but didn’t pursue this thought. Many decades later, I wrote this idea up as a story. The problem was that I never received any formal instruction in Yoga, and in fact I didn’t go to a Yoga class until the 1990s. One possible legacy of this is that some of my joints are not in perfect condition, but this is not Yoga’s fault so much as me doing asanas when I was a child and my body was still developing, and because I didn’t have any education from others in it. Had I actually successfully campaigned for the inclusion of Yoga in my school, things would probably have been very different. I don’t know what position Yoga had in secondary education at that point. Funnily enough, I did have formal instruction in Tai Chi at the end of the ’80s, at Warwick Uni.
Yoga was, however, one of those things which stayed with me, and I did incorporate some of it into my everyday life such as pranayama, meditation and a handful of asanas. Later on, marrying Sarada made a big positive difference to how I practiced, although by then I did sporadically practice a series of asanas every morning and had been since about 1991.
I think of Yoga as part of the fundamental fabric of reality and the practice of it as in some ways akin to using the principles of physics to design an electronic device. I don’t think it “belongs” to anyone and don’t understand how it could. This brings up the first really depressing issue to do with Yoga: claiming intellectual property rights on it. This has been done a few times, notably by Bikram Choudhury, notorious for the claims of sexual assault in his classes, so to be ad hominem for a moment maybe this is the degree of enlightenment someone who would attempt to patent Yoga has. On the other hand, good sequences can be arrived at by people which are worth promoting.
I’m going to take a break from this more abstract stuff to describe my practice of Hatha Yoga this morning, after going for a run. I began, as I usually do in recent decades, by relaxing in Savasana, corpse posture. This is simply lying supine with relatively abducted limbs and relaxing. A very long time ago indeed, I induced a post-hypnotic suggestion which enables me to relax completely in this position immediately, but the usual practice, and perhaps a more mindful one, is to pass over one’s body either from head to toe or vice versa and relax muscle groups. Before I used Savasana, I used what I think is called the “spinal rock”, which is where you roll yourself into a ball on your back and rock back and forth. I followed this with Sarvangasana, the shoulderstand. A useful way to think about this is to imagine your body is a candle with your feet as the candle flame, which reminds you to keep it vertical. I usually do the supported shoulderstand and go immediately into Halasana, the plough. Since I was doing this in a small room and I’m 178 centimetres tall, I wasn’t able to touch the floor with my feet and in fact there is a general issue with being able to do asanas at all in this house because of how we’ve arranged the furniture. Space is just rather limited. I think there are supposed to be, in imperial, fifty square feet available per person practicing asanas. I then did a twist, Jathara Parivartanasana, although a variant where one reaches across with one’s free arm. Although counterposes are important, on this occasion I didn’t consciously do any, although I did do Jathara Parivartasana both ways round.
I’m having some difficulty describing the actual experience of doing asanas because it’s very much in the area of proprioception and various sensations which are hard to verbalise. One thing which is easier to verbalise is the cracking and clunking sounds and sensations one may get in one’s joints in the process. I wonder, in fact, whether it’s even a good idea to attempt to verbalise it in that way. At one point in the ‘noughties after doing quite a bit of Hatha Yoga, I became acutely and constantly aware of how I distributed my weight between my legs. I found that intrusive and unwelcome.
Vajrasana and a superficially similar asana where one stretches one’s arms above one’s head palm to palm came next. It’s an issue for me, and probably other people, that asanas can appear identical to an untrained observer while involving completely different balances of forces, and this is not problematic in this case but the fact that I’ve described these two as similar illustrates this possible confusion. They are not in fact similar. The version of Vajrasana I usually do is not the one where you put your hands behind your back in a prayer position but the much simpler one involving placing one’s hands upon one’s knees and tensing one’s whole body. The asana involving raising one’s arms above one’s head also involves kneeling but the emphasis is on stretching upward. Simhasana came next, which is the kind of thing one probably would prefer to do alone, or at least I would, due to self-consciousness relating to the facial expression. I always follow Vajrasana with Simhasana. This I then followed with Supta Vajrasana, partly because I wanted to have something to do a counterpose I actually knew to. In fact I didn’t touch my head to the floor on doing this, but there is a central focus in Hatha Yoga as many people, at least in the West, practice it, that one avoid “end-gaining”, which is perhaps a good general principle whereby one should live much of one’s life. This principle is actually from Alexander Technique, and amounts to the ends justifying the means in practical terms: getting there is definitely not half the fun if you’re end-gaining, and there can therefore be a lack of self-awareness involved. It was also the case, for different reasons, that my feet didn’t touch the floor during Halasana, but this doesn’t matter. That said, repeated and balanced practice of asanas can involve such events occurring. I’m avoiding saying “achievements” here. This issue will come up later in a wider context.
Supta Vajrasana I followed with Balasana, which I think is Suptasya Vajrasanasya counterpose. A counterpose is close to the inverse of another asana, or rather they’re each others’ inverses, with the same muscle groups and joints in the opposite states. Balasana, like Halasana and Sarvangasana, are inverted poses where the head is lower than the heart, which often means that the uterus is higher and should therefore be avoided during menstruation. Even after all this time, I’m not convinced that inverted poses are beneficial because it seems to me they put too much pressure on the cerebral circulation. Then again, it could be a case of “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and it can make sense to put the body under stress.
Next came Bhujangasana. This is one of two asanas I find very confusing, or in this case rather I used to. Bhujangasana involves flexing the spine while supporting oneself with one’s arms from a prone starting point. This looks exactly the same to me as pushing up with the arms until the back is curved dorsally, but as I understand it, the spine pulls up from the floor while the arms may almost be dangling from the shoulders and resting on the floor. I’m aware that I’m saying “floor” here when I might have said “ground” or “earth”, and I did in fact practice indoors. I’m also not saying “mat”. More of that later. Although I usually follow this with Dhanurasana, this time I didn’t.
Following Bhujangasana came the for me notorious Adho Mukha Śvānāsana (oh look, diacritics and everything – I copypasted that particular term). This is an asana I find utterly confounding, as some people know. It’s the Down Face Dog, and I included it in today’s session because I wanted to indicate its utterly confusing nature to me. My issue with Adho Mukha Svanasana is that its appearance gives no indication at all of how one is “supposed to be” distributing the forces in one’s body. It’s entirely unclear to me most of the time whether the hands are supposed to take the weight or the legs, essentially. I’m vaguely aware, and very willing to be corrected on this, that the general idea seems to be that one is reaching forward rather than resting on one’s arms and hands, but I find this so difficult that this asana is really off-putting to me. It casts doubt on whether I’m doing any other asana “properly”. I’m also aware that the language I’ve used in this paragraph kind of contradicts the general idea of avoiding end-gaining.
I followed Adho Mukha Svanasana with Trikonasana, which is fairly straightforward in comparison, and my final asana was Tadasana, and yes this does mean that I didn’t go back into Savasana at the end. More generally, this is just a hastily thrown together ad hoc session of asanas which is not particularly balanced or rationally planned. Some of them were included simply so I could write about them here. My sessions are not always like this. I should also mention that the different stages of asanas are accompanied by inhalation and exhalation, which serve to time the pace at which they are undertaken. Particular ratios of breathing and styles of doing so, in other words pranayama, can also be involved. It was notable that when I practiced in a class, I was initially much faster than everyone else, but after a few months I ended up being slower than everyone else, for this reason, which is surprising because I’m also aware that I breathe unusually slowly in other situations.
Regarding the surface I practice on, I rarely use a mat. This is because mats are usually padded, and this makes it harder to balance. Vrksasana is a good illustration of this issue, because standing on one leg is much harder on a yielding surface than a firm one. I think it’s usual practice to do asanas barefoot. Doing them on the first floor as opposed to the ground floor also feels psychologically peculiar to me because of the space I’m aware of beneath me – I don’t feel grounded. Ultimately the approach I would feel most comfortable with is to do it on a lawn, beach or meadow, i.e. a place where I’m in direct contact with Earth. Another aspect of using a mat is that it’s a material possession. This is also why I sometimes do asanas naked, but this basically means doing them indoors.
It’s important to be aware of two things relating to Hatha Yoga. One is that it’s only one aspect of Yoga and separating it from the rest of the approach can be inappropriate. Another is that recently there’s been a change in how people view Yoga. Perhaps in the past, if someone asked what kind of Yoga one practiced, one might say Hatha, Raja, Pranayama and so forth. More recently they would be more likely to expect one to refer to some kind of branded and commercialised practice such as Bikram, though probably not that specifically because of the scandals surrounding it. To me, those don’t even seem to be Yoga at all because of their involvement with global capitalism and their marketing, which would appear to take Karma Yoga completely out of the picture.
All of this contrasts dramatically with the recent Indian approach. Yoga is classed as Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO, and this opens up the possibility of cultural appropriation but also of ethnonationalist exploitation, and it’s this last which has led to the creation of International Day Of Yoga by Narendra Modi. The fact that this is also the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere is not coincidental, having special significance in many cultures. The idea has many positives, and it is not, of course, up to the West to decide what should be done with Yoga, but it’s also quite reminiscent of the idea that Indo-Aryan languages are the original Indo-European languages and that the Aryans originated in South Asia. There are plenty of reasons why this latter cannot be so, for instance the presence of retroflex consonants in Vedic Sanskrit and the levelling of vowels to schwa in the same, and a similar issue is the promotion of Yoga as an Olympic sport. Yoga is widely perceived as about self-acceptance, being non-judgemental and not comparing oneself and others. There has actually been a Yoga Asana Championship in New York City. Whereas there’s no denying that a particular execution of an asana has aesthetic appeal, to me all of this is anathema to Yoga. The only way I can make sense of it is to wonder if the West has done something to the values of Yoga which meant that the likes of end-gaining were actually originally part of the tradition and have been lost. However, whether or not this is so, it’s hard to see where spiritual aspects of Hatha Yoga would come into this and it seems to have filtered out the whole of the rest of Yoga, such as Raja. Could there be such a thing as competitive samadhi?
On the other hand, what are Olympic ideals? The modern revival of the Olympics at least seems to have positive aspects, involving the replacement of warfare with athletic contests, and presumably sporting ideals regarding “how one plays the game”. It’s also the case that the modern Olympics originally included more than sport, encompassing for example town planning and architecture, and there are also exhibition sports. It still seems utterly bizarre to me that Yoga, by which Hatha Yoga seems to be meant, could be part of it, particularly in its current rather corrupted state.
I mentioned the London Healing Mission early on in this post. I have to tread a thin line here because, being Christian, I’m aware of certain attitudes towards Yoga and actions against it which pertain to specific people and small organisations which I don’t want to criticise publicly, but there have been quite public denouncements of the practice by Christians too. Some of these correspond to the Indian emphasis on Siva and the idea that it’s a spiritual path which does not include the saving power of Christ. This, to be fair, is at least levelled at Yoga as a whole rather than just Hatha Yoga, so in a weird way Christian opposition to Yoga has a more accurate view of it than the popular understanding of it. I am of course Christian, and I’ve even had tendencies towards being “that kind of Christian”, but I think there are elements of racism for some people, though not all, in this opposition. I do, however, have a remedy based on what might be termed the metaphysics.
The diagram which started this post has Samkhya as an early source for what I would call the discovery of Yoga, and Vedantism is another approach. “Vedanta” means “end of the Vedas”, and that source can also be seen in the diagram. Vedanta attempts in various ways to articulate the implications of the Upanisads, Bhagavad Gita and Brahma Sutras. Vedanta universally accepts reincarnation, moksa (also known as nirvana) as an ideal, karma as resulting from agency, a God-like first cause of the Cosmos, the Hindu scriptures as the best source of knowledge and the rejection of Buddhism, Jainism, Samkhya and Yoga itself. Hence with the Vedantist approach to Yoga, clearly some careful approach needs to be taken to understanding due to the fact that it rejects Yoga, but for a Christian it would seem to require unity between God and Isvara or Brahman. Although I do believe this is so, I don’t have complete confidence in the fact and in any case because Christianity for me involves intense personal focus on God through Christ, even to think about whether Hinduism is or is not antithetical to Christianity would only be relevant to me if I were actually Hindu myself, which I’m not, so I withhold judgement.
Consequently, I believe in Samkhya as the philosophy behind Yoga and see it as expressing fundamental truths about reality. Samkhya is atheistic, but I adopt it because I’m theist. Samkhya is atheistic because God cannot be observed and karma is a sufficient ruling principle in the Universe. I would prefer to see God as withdrawing from a portion of reality to allow the physical Universe to exist. This is the Jewish philosophical concept of Tsimtsum, “contraction”, which posits that G-d allows a finite, vacant space, “ḥālāl happānuy”, to exist in which physical events occur. Within this space, Samkhya operates, with its division between prakrti and purusa, “nature” and “consciousness” respectively. Also within it operate the three gunas, known as sattvas, tamas and rajas, positivity/vitality, dynamism and inertia, which initially condense separately out of primordial harmony and work themselves through, ultimately but temporarily becoming re-unified. This period of working out is the history of our current Universe. Yoga is based on this, seeing the jiva as a situation where purusa is in some form bound to prakrti. The gunas are present in all beings in different proportions, and are manifested in the practice of Yoga, for instance tamas is in my reluctance to do asanas first thing in the morning (tamas), and in other areas of my life such as procrastination or not wanting to tidy up. I’d venture to claim that tamas is in fact another name for thanatos, the death instinct. Rajas and sattvas can also be understood very prosaically in the practice of asanas. It’s well-known that Hatha Yoga makes one fart. This is technically understood as the action of rajas on the digestive system. It doesn’t have to be considered to be off somewhere in a mystical realm of some kind. Likewise, nothing I’ve said about Samkhya should contradict either empirical science or the Christian or other faiths.
Yoga is an extremely large topic and it’s hard to do it justice under pressure of time, so I will close with an observation made about cakras. Cakra is Sanskrit for “wheel” and is also cognate with that English word and the Greek “kyklos”. There often seems to be a lot of scorn piled upon the concept, but as I’ve said, nothing in Yoga or Samhya contradicts science, including medical science, and there is a particular way of understanding them which harmonises them quite easily. Each cakra is associated with an endocrine organ and with an inflexion point in the spine, including the cranium as part of that, thus:
| Cakra name | Axial skeletal point | Endocrine organ |
| Muladhara | Tip of coccyx | Adrenal cortex |
| Svadisthana | Sacrum | Gonads |
| Manipura | L3 (most ventral lumbar vertebra) | Endocrine pancreas |
| Anahata | T6 (most dorsal thoracic vertebra) | Thymus |
| Visuddha | C7 | Thyroid |
| Ajña | Occiput | Pituitary (both) |
| Sahasrara | Crown of skull | Pineal |
The thing about this list is that it can be declared by fiat. Cakras can be seen as simply referring to at least this trio of association while remaining agnostic about the rest, or they can be extended. Claiming that they don’t exist is therefore foolish. Moreover, each of these inflexions of the spine is mechanically significant and connected to our evolutionary history. Brian Aldiss refers to “rational yoga” in his mainstream novel ‘Life In The West’. Very many aspects of Yoga can be understood rationalistically without contradicting scientific understanding, particularly with a Samkhya-based approach, and for this reason I adopt this approach. It’s particularly compatible with Abrahamic religion too, because it fits with a God who maintains the physical Universe through Tsimtsum.
However, there is one final irony here. After repenting and committing myself to Christ, I almost immediately fell away due to factors such as homophobia and opposition to veganism and Yoga. I also assiduously avoided raising the Kundalini because it was widely regarded as dangerous by yogis themselves. Then one day in the mid-‘nineties at Leicester Friends’ Meeting House, I went to a yoga session whose focus was on raising the Kundalini, and it led to two things: the intense presence of other Christians in my life and ultimately my return to the Christian faith. There is a pattern of this kind of thing happening in my life, and I definitely do not explain it through metaphysical naturalism.
Happy International Day Of Yoga!
A Box Of Chocolates 
