New Light on Yoga

From loincloths to leotards, yoga has come a long way in 5,000 years. But is yoga as we know it really that old?

By Anne Cushman

A couple of years ago, when I had just returned to Yoga Journal after six months of traveling to ashrams and holy sites in India, I got a call from a writer for Mirabella magazine who was researching a fashion spread on exercise wear.

"I was wondering" she said, "what is the traditional outfit for doing yoga?"

I thought of the naked yogis I had seen on the banks of the Ganges, their skin smeared with ashes from the cremation pyre to remind themselves of the body's impermanence, their foreheads painted with the insignia of Shiva, the god of destruction. I couldn't resist.

"Well, traditionally, you would carry a trident and cover your body with the ashes of the dead," I told her.

There was a long pause, during which I could practically hear her thinking, "This will never fly with the Beauty Editor." Finally I took pity on her. "But alternatively," I said, "a leotard and tights will work just fine."

"Tradition" is a word that gets tossed around a lot in yoga circles. We're taught the "traditional" way to do poses: "The feet are hip-width apart in Downward-Facing Dog." We're taught the "traditional" way to string them together: "Headstand comes before Shoulderstand." We take comfort in believing that we're the heirs to an ancient treasury of knowledge, the latest bead in a mala that stretches back, unbroken, for generations. In rootless, amnesiac American culture—where "traditions," like lipstick colors, change every season—the very antiquity of yoga gives it instant cachet, as evidenced by the jackets of yoga videos advertising a "5,000-year-old exercise system."

Modern yoga masters present us with a whole galaxy of different poses, or asanas—Iyengar's Light on Yoga (Schocken Books, 1995), the modern illustrated Bible of asana practice, depicts more than 200. And most new yoga students accept it as an article of faith that these poses have been practiced—in more or less this form—for centuries. As we fold into Downward-Facing Dog, arch into Upward Bow, or spiral into a spinal twist named for an ancient sage, we believe that we are molding our bodies into archetypal shapes whose precise effect on the body, mind, and nervous system has been charted over generations of practice.

In its most extreme form, homage to tradition can create a breed of "yoga fundamentalists"—yogis who believe the asanas were channeled directly from God and passed down through their particular lineage. Any deviation from their version of gospel will result in excommunication.

Tradition? Says Who?

But what really is "traditional" hatha yoga? You don't have to look much further than Mirabella (or Yoga Journal) to realize that yoga in the West has already changed form. Some of these changes are superficial: We don't practice in loincloths in solitary mountain caves, but on plastic mats in crowded, mirror-walled gyms wearing outfits that would get us lynched in Mother India. Other changes are more significant: For example, before the twentieth century, it was practically unheard of for women to do hatha yoga.

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