The lotus and the downward dog

A few years ago, when the luxury of a dual-income household afforded me a gym membership, which I rarely used anyway, I went to one of the yoga classes there. It felt strange that I had never cared for yoga back when I was growing up in the very country that was the homeland for yoga, but I was at a yoga class in a land halfway around the world that was now home to me.

The teacher was a white woman. Of course. And before the class began, she had us do some breathing exercises with the sound of "om" in the background. And ended the class with a "namaste." I could not understand why she could not conduct a yoga class that was focused on the exercises without all the om and the namaste.  I never went back!

Yoga is big business here in the US, despite all the om and namaste:

Across America, students, stressed-out young professionals, CEOs and retirees are among those who have embraced yoga, fueling a $27 billion industry with more than 20 million practitioners -- 83 percent of them women.

As Ramesh humorously noted a few months ago, the industry is not merely about the teachers and asanas, but also about the yoga gear:

What foxes me is this. Who on earth wants to pay $ 92 for a "Om pant".  Do yoga by all means, but concentrate on , well, the yoga. Does it matter an iota whether your pant is "om" or "not om" ?? 

So, how did this yoga craze begin?  In a review essay, William Dalrymple writes about a whole bunch of stuff that is simply way above my head--damn these smart people!  He notes there:

The Sanskrit word yoga means “union” and is etymologically linked to the English word “yoke.” Its earliest occurrence in the Rig Veda, which dates from the second millennium BCE when both the Pyramids and Stonehenge were still in use, links the word to the rig with which war chariots were yoked to horses; by the early centuries AD the same word is being used to convey the idea of the body and the senses being yoked and reined in so as to move toward the Absolute.
It is possible that the oldest image in Indian art shows a yogi in meditation: one of the Indus Valley seals dug up at Mohenjo Daro by Sir John Marshall in 1931, dating from between 2600 and 1900 BC, shows a cross-legged figure that Marshall interpreted to be Shiva as Mahayogi and Lord of the Beasts. This interpretation has been questioned by some scholars, but the Vedas, which date from maybe five hundred years after the Indus Valley seal, already contain references to flying long-haired sages that indicate even then the presence of a mystical tradition related to the world of the yogis.

I had no idea that yoga and yoke would be examples of the Indo-Latin family tree for languages. Something new every single day!

there has always been a clear duality visible in the objectives of the yogis. Some were focused entirely on the interior: on breathing exercises and mastery of the body as a route to self-understanding and spiritual liberation. Others, however, were clearly searching for the magical tantric powers that they believed yoga could unleash. There are hints of this tension already in the Yoga Sutras where Patanjali outlines the route to union with the Absolute, while making it clear that an accomplished yogi can perform all sorts of useful tricks in this life: flying, transmigrating, reading other people’s minds, and even defying death itself.

One interpretation of the Buddha's life that I recall is that he went through years of living the life of a yogi from that physical, body route.  The extreme rigor he put the body through as the route to self-realization didn't work though.

Even now there are yogis in plenty in India who practice that extreme-yoga, which always makes me wonder if an atheist will willingly engage in twisting self into a pretzel and denying oneself of food and water for days.

I am far more comfortable with the wisdom from my favorite yogi of all, Yogi Berra, who said you can observe a lot by watching. I will watch those doing yoga, especially when 83 percent of the yoga students are women ;)