For many Americans, yoga is simply another kind of workout, something you might choose in place of a lifting session or a run. Yet many yoga instructors give directions that veer in a different direction—visualizing grounding into the earth below your feet to gain resilience or stretching your hips to feel an emotional release. As philosopher Eric C. Mullis writes, this raises questions about how modern, secular yoga practitioners should relate to elements of the practice based in a worldview they don’t share.
Yoga is an ancient practice. But Mullis notes that the version found in the Vedas, written in the neighborhood of 3,000 years ago, doesn’t have much in common with modern postural yoga (MPY). Those texts describe a set of practices by male ascetics who worked to control the body for spiritual reasons. Postures played only a small role in this tradition, alongside seated meditation, dietary rules, and other methods of purification.
Traditional yoga also used specific breathing patterns to build up internal heat, increasing the circulation of energy known as prana. The heat purifies natural material of the body and moves it upward toward spiritual realms.
As the name suggests, MPY is a much more recent invention. It developed in the nineteenth century as part of a nationalist movement that pushed back against the English colonial stereotype of Indians as weak and effeminate. It mixed aspects of Vedic practices with European and American gymnastics and “physical culture.” Like the ancient forms of yoga, Indian MPY was specifically targeted at men, though in the US and Europe it was quickly adopted by women as well. The developers of MPY leaned away from the more esoteric elements, instead advocating for the value of prana in developing physical, mental, and moral strength.
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Yet today, many American yoga instructors still refer to aspects of the ancient Indian spiritual-medical system, something that seems potentially at odds with most practitioners’ understanding of modern science.
“To put it rather bluntly, anatomy and physiology do not reveal prana, chakras, or nadis,” Mullis writes.
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To some observers, white Americans’ embrace of yoga reflects an Orientalist view that sees practices from other cultures as more “authentic” while glossing over aspects of these traditions that conflict with their overall worldview.
However, Mullis suggests that there are ways to reconcile the possible contradictions. One is simply to ignore the Vedic view of yoga’s value and treat it as a useful form of exercise and stress reduction. Another is to study the philosophy behind yoga as part of a pluralistic approach to embodied practices. And yet another is to employ imagery commonly used in yoga instruction without taking it literally—for example, “breathe into the kidneys” can be a cue to focus on sensations in your lower abdomen during in and out breaths.
“One can imaginatively open oneself to the claims made by MPY and can investigate how they can affect one’s experience of embodiment,” Mullis writes.
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