07.20.07
History of Yoga
The word, yoga, is derived from Sanskrit. Yoga is more than mastering postures and increasing your flexibility and strength. History of Yoga spans from four to eight thousand years ago to the current day. Yoga’s history has many places of obscurity and uncertainty due to its oral transmission of sacred texts and the secretive nature of its teachings. Yoga is a complete science of life that originated in India many thousands of years ago. It is the oldest system of personal development in the world encompassing the entire body, mind and spirit.It is the union between a person’s own consciousness and the universal consciousness. Yoga views man’s problem primarily in terms of ignorance. Man simply does not understand he is God so the solution is enlightenment, or an experience of union with God. Yoga was more prominently mention in the Upanishads which are the sacred revelations of ancient Hinduism the earliest mention dates back to 800 to 500 B.C.E. Yoga can’t be recognized as a complete and complex tradition before about 500 B.C.
Two yoga disciplines gained popularity at this time, one was called karma yoga, the path of action or ritual, and jnana yoga, the path of knowledge or intense study of the scriptures. Archaic Yoga was community oriented, as it attempted to discern the cosmic order through inner vision, then to apply that order to daily living. The Vedic Yoga, also known as Archaic Yoga, revolves around the thought of reuniting the visible material world with the invisible spiritual world by sacrificing certain things. The Vedas were a collection of texts contained songs and rituals used by Brahmans, the Vedic priests. Yoga was slowly refined and developed by Vedic priests, who documented their practices and beliefs in the Upanishads, a huge work containing over 200 scriptures. The Yoga Sutras where most likely written around year 100-200 A.C. and consists of about 200 aphorisms (words of wisdom). It is composed of 195 aphorisms or sutras (from the Sanskrit word which means thread) that expound upon the Raja Yoga.
Yoga was introduced in the West during the early 19th century. Sivananda wrote more than 200 books on Yoga and Philosophy and had many disciples who furthered Yoga. Yoga has gained tremendously in popularity during the last few years, and today over 30 million people practise Yoga on a regular basis. Peoples attitude towards health, spirituality, way of life and our place in society have changed quite dramatically, as people are looking for answers for their everyday problems. Some of them were Swami Satchitananda who introduced chanting and Yoga to Woodstock; Swami Sivananada Radha who explored the connection between psychology and Yoga, and Yogi Bhajan who started teaching Kundalini Yoga in the 70’s. Hatha Yoga now has many different schools or styles, all emphasizing the many different aspects of the practice. Yoga teaches us to focus on ourselves instead of on the one true God. It encourages us to seek the answers to life’s difficult questions within our own conscience instead of in the Bible.