Yoga

Yoga Body, Yoga Spirit: Can We Have Both?

It's easy to see why John Friend recommends Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Yoga to "all sincere understudies of yoga." Mark Singleton's hypothesis is a well-informed examination of how present hatha yoga, or "stance practice," as he refers to it, has evolved both inside and outside of India.

However, the book is primarily about how yoga has evolved in India during the last 150 years. T. Krishnamacharya and his understudies, K. Patttabhi Jois and B. K. S. Iyengar, merged their indigenous hatha yoga practices with European vaulting.

This was the number of Indian yogis who adapted to advancement by moving to the city and embracing the approaching European social trends, rather than remaining in the Himalayan caves. They were especially fond of its "obscure sorts of aerobatics," such as Ling's enthralling Swedish maneuvers (1766-1839).

To make sense of the essential purpose of his thesis, Singleton uses the word yoga as a homonym. That is, he emphasizes that the term yoga can have a variety of meanings depending on who uses it.

This emphasis is a laudable goal for students of all things yoga; to comprehend and admit that your yoga may not be the same as mine. Simply put, yoga can be done in a variety of ways.

As a result, John Friend is completely correct: this is by far the most thorough examination of the way of life and history of the enthralling yoga heritage that stretches from T. Krishnamacharya's steamy and hot castle studio in Mysore to Bikram's deceptively warming studio in Hollywood.

The majority of the book is devoted to Singleton's focus on "postural yoga." However, he also devotes a few pages to setting the historical context of "traditional" yoga, from Patanjali to the Shaiva Tantrics, who, in light of much earlier yoga customs, compiled the hatha yoga tradition in medieval times and wrote the well-known yoga reading materials the Hatha Yoga Pradipika and the Geranda Samhita.

Singleton gets into water that is far hotter than a Bikram sweat while performing these assessments. Along these lines, I'm debating whether or not to give Singleton an A for his overall excellent thesis.

Singleton claims that his project is solely focused on researching modern stance yoga. If he had focused solely on that project, his book would have been fantastic and deservedly recognized. Unfortunately, he makes the same mistake that many modern hatha yogis do.

All yoga styles are acceptable, according to these hatha yogis. They guarantee that all homonyms are equally great and legitimate. However, homonym is a presumptuous type of yoga according to social relativist hatha yogis. Why? Because its adherents, the conservatives, ensure that it is a more profound, otherworldly, and traditional kind of yoga.

Singleton believes that this type of positioning is unhelpful and futile.

Georg Feuerstein has a lot of disagreements. He is one of those conservatives who believes yoga is a vital practice—a body, mind, and soul practice—and is without a doubt the most productive and well-regarded yoga researcher outside of India today. What is the difference between Feuerstein's essential yoga homonym and Singleton's non-basic current position yoga homonym?

Essentially, Feuerstein's outstanding yoga compositions have focused on the all-encompassing act of yoga. Asanas, pranayama (breathing exercises), chakra (unpretentious energy centers), kundalini (otherworldly energy), bandhas (progressed body locks), mantras, mudras (hand movements), and so on are only some of the practices that traditional yoga has developed over the last 5000 years or so.

While posture yoga focuses mostly on the physical body and executing poses, required yoga encompasses both the physical and inconspicuous bodies and involves a wide range of physical, mental, and profound activities that are rarely practiced in any of today's yoga facilities.

Without Singleton's reference to Feuerstein in a basic light in his book's "Finishing up Reflections," I would never have attempted to bring this up. At the end of the day, Singleton must study Feuerstein's idea of yoga, a sort of yoga that happens to essentially accord with my own.

"For some, such as smash hit yoga researcher Georg Feuerstein, advanced interest in postural yoga must constitute a distortion of the legitimate yoga of custom," Singleton writes. Then Singleton references Feuerstein, who writes that when yoga came on Western shores, it "was gradually robbed of its profound direction and transformed into wellness preparation."

Singleton then correctly points out that yoga had earlier sparked this wellness shift in India. He also correctly points out that wellbeing yoga is unrelated to any "otherworldly" yoga practice. In any event, it isn't Feuerstein's point: he's merely pointing out how the actual activity of contemporary yoga misses the mark on significant "otherworldly direction." That's an important distinction to make.

Then Singleton screams that Feuerstein's views ignore the "very otherworldly direction of a few contemporary working out and ladies' wellbeing preparing in the harmonial acrobatic tradition."

While I believe I understand what Feuerstein means by "profoundly otherworldly," I am still unsure what Singleton means by it after reading Yoga Body. Furthermore, this complicates a clever correlation. As a result, why did Singleton bring this up in his concluding remarks in a book devoted to genuine positions? Without a doubt, to reach a significant conclusion.

I suppose I should respond because he brought it up.

The goal of yoga, according to Feuerstein, is illumination (Samadhi), not actual wellness, even profound actual wellness. Not a better, leaner outward appearance, but a better chance of profound liberation.

Yoga, in his opinion, is essentially an otherworldly practice that involves profound positions, profound evaluation, and profound contemplation. Despite the fact that postures are an important part of traditional yoga, sages like Ananda Mai Ma, Ramana Maharishi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, and others have proved that illumination is possible even without them.

The most in-depth question about yoga's goal, according to traditional yoga, is this: is it possible to achieve edification just via the practice of wellness yoga? The answer isn't really straightforward. It's not even rational. Not even by practicing "otherworldly" health yoga, as Singleton says.

The body, according to essential yoga, is the first and most visible layer of the psyche. Regardless, edification takes place in and beyond the fifth and deepest layer of the inconspicuous body, or kosa, rather than in the actual body. As a result, according to this unique point of view of yoga, wellness yoga has defined cutoff thresholds, simply because it cannot be the sole way to achieve the best results.

Similarly, Feuerstein and all of us other conservatives (oh, those dreadful labels!) are basically stating that if your goal is illumination, health yoga is probably not the way to go. You can stay on your head and perform control yoga from 8 a.m. until 12 p.m., but you won't be enlightened.

As a result, they created specialized sitting yoga stances (padmasana, siddhasana, virasana, and so on) for these goals. They spent far more time standing still in meditation than moving around executing poses, because it was the seated practices that induced the optimal dreamy conditions of enlightenment, or Samadhi.

At the end of the day, you can be illuminated without ever practicing the various hatha positions, but you are unlikely to be edified solely by practicing these stances, no matter how "otherworldly" they are.

While reading Yoga Body, I was missing these kinds of layered experiences and points of view. As a result, his assessment of Feuerstein appears to be superficial and knee-jerk.

Singleton's sole focus on showing the actual practice and history of modern yoga is thorough, likely extremely precise, and quite impressive; but, his requirement that current aerobatic and performance yoga contain "profoundly otherworldly" elements overlooks a key point about yoga. In particular, from that region in our souls, profound inside and beyond the body, our bodies are just as otherworldly as we appear to be.

As a result, Yoga Body overlooks an important point that many of us reserve the right to assert without fear of being chastised for being arrogant or mean-spirited: that yoga is essentially a comprehensive practice, in which the physical body is viewed as the first layer of a progression of climbing and broadly inclusive layers of being-from body to mind to soul. Also, that the body, in the end, becomes the habitation of Spirit. The body is the sacred sanctuary of Spirit in its whole.

What's more, where does this yoga viewpoint originate? "It underpins the entire Tantric tradition, particularly the schools of hatha yoga, which are a branch-off of Tantrism," says Feuerstein.

In Tantra, the individual is clearly seen as a three-layered being: physical, mental, and otherworldly. As a result, the Tantrics skillfully and deliberately devised rehearses for each of the three levels of being.

According to this antiquated viewpoint, it is extremely satisfying to see how more otherworldly, broadly inclusive tantric and yogic practices, such as hatha yoga, mantra contemplation, breathing activities, ayurveda, kirtan, and scriptural review, are gradually becoming essential elements of many advanced yoga studios.

In this vein, I'd like to respond to the question posed in the title of this post. Would we be able to do yoga with both an agile physical make-up and a sacred soul? We can, without a doubt. Yoga isn't an either/or proposition. Yoga is a combination of yes and no. The more extensive our yoga practice becomes, the more profound our posture practice becomes—the more these two seemingly opposing elements, the body and the soul, mix and bond together. All things considered, the goal of old Tantra was to achieve unity.

Perhaps a book about this new, ever-growing homonym of global yoga will be written soon? Yoga Body by Mark Singleton is not one of those books. However, a book about this, shall we say, neo-traditional or holistic kind of yoga would be a fascinating cultural exploration.

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