Excerpts from The Path of Modern Yoga
From Part I Divesting Yoga of the Sacred: Yogic Physical Culture and Health Cure
Chapter Two: Shri Yogendra—Creating the Role of Yoga Teacher: The Yoga Class
[In 1918, 21-year-old Shri Yogendra, who had just broken with his guru, from whom he learned how to apply yogic treatment modalities to illnesses, met Homi Dadina, a cosmopolitan Parsi consulting engineer plagued with various ailments, in Versova, a suburb of Bombay on the Arabian Sea.]
After informally teaching yoga to Dadina and a few other men on the beach, Yogendra founded the Yoga Institute in Dadina’s house. The first batch of students enrolled for a regular course on December 25, 1918. The instruction held that Christmas morning on Versova beach was a momentous event that marked the first step in the formation of modern hatha yoga. “This was a red-letter day in the history of Yoga,” proclaims Yogendra’s biographer, Santan Rodrigues. “For the first time Yoga was taught to the man of the world.”
In founding the Yoga Institute, Yogendra had relocated the center of hatha yoga instruction from the realm of the sacred, the ashram, where renunciates withdrew from ordinary society to seek spiritual liberation, to the realm of the secular, the yoga center or institute, where students exercised together to improve their health. He had made an essentially religious experience into a secular experience. The means of this subversion of the hatha yoga tradition was its radical—but now axiomatic—form of instruction: the yoga class.
Excerpt 1
From Part II Making Yoga Dynamic: The Sun Salutations as Yogic Exercise
Chapter 15: Bhavanarao Pant Pratinidhi—Promoting Surya Namaskar as Health Cure and Strengthening Exercise
[Bhavanarao Pant Pratinidhi, the rajah of Aundh, refined, codified, and promoted surya namaskar, sun salutation, an exercise that links ten asana-like positions into a flowing sequence, in the early 20th century. In 1928 he published the first sun salutation manual, Surya Namaskars (Sun-Adoration) for Health, Efficiency & Longevity.]
The most significant fitness aspect of surya namaskar, however—and the one that Bhavanarao didn’t grasp—was another element totally absent in its rival Indian popular exercise, hatha yoga: dynamic stretching. Formed by bringing its previously preparatory conditioning poses to the fore, hatha yoga is based on static stretching, which involves holding a pose. Surya namaskar, in contrast, is based on the kind of dynamic stretching that involves rhythmic motion. The series of movements of surya namaskar are vigorously repeated in order to increasingly deepen the sequence of stretches. In time, some yogins would come to incorporate this form of dynamic flexibility into their yoga regimes—tagging it onto or even infusing it into their regimes—as a necessary means of obtaining overall flexibility.
Excerpt 2
From Part III Making Yoga Sacred Again: Yogic Embodied Spirituality
Chapter 34: B. K. S. Iyengar—Making Asana Practice into a Meditation of Insight
[In the mid 20th century, the yoga master B. K. S. Iyengar brought an unprecedented rigor to the practice of asana-focused yoga. As yoga teacher Karin Stephan writes, “His flair for precision, a sense of perfection in each movement” distinguished his yoga from “standard Hatha Yoga.”]
Dedicated to the precise performance of often challenging asanas, the hatha yoga developed by B. K. S. Iyengar seemed particularly ill suited for being made into a spiritual practice, let alone the eightfold path of liberation explicated by Patanjali in the Yoga Sutra. What made it the ripest form of late 20th-century hatha yoga to undergo a spiritual transformation, however, was exactly its emphasis on the performance of asana, rather than on the benefits of asana practice to our lives outside the classroom—even such worthwhile benefits as acquiring good health, maintaining flexibility, relieving stress, becoming a better person, or facilitating steadiness and ease in seated meditation. “In other words,” as yoga scholar Norman Sjoman explains, “the asanas [in Iyengar yoga] become complete in their own right, they have their own indigenous ‘mystique.’ The realization of that ‘mystique’ [is] in the complexities of the movement itself—a suitable object considering the complex psycho-physical nature of movement, stillness and balance.”
Iyengar was by no means the first yogin to analyze asanas, separating the poses into their constituent parts and closely examining those parts. Detailed instructions for practicing asanas first appeared in book form in the first modern yoga manual, Yogic Physical Culture, published in 1929 by S. Sundaram (who based his instructions on those found in articles in Kuvalayananda’s Yoga-Mimansa), and have appeared in almost all subsequent yoga manuals. But Iyengar comprehended the complexities of asana to a greater degree than his predecessors and contemporaries. And it’s the great concentration demanded by his exquisite, intricate instructions to address these complexities that makes performing asana in an Iyengar classroom a suitable object of the eight-step meditation, including the three interiorized components, collectively called samyama, which Iyengar translated as “total integration.”