Yoga Report

When I hear a teachers who talk about the importance of keeping up the yoga tradition I react with mixed emotions. First of all Yoga was mentioned the first time roughly 2500 years ago. In the Katha Upanishad it refers to a state where you gain control over the senses and the mental activity stops. This leads to a supreme state. In the old texts there is no reference on how this is done practically and this is where the confusion starts. A marathon runner can gain control over the senses and by that his mental activity stops. There are many roads leading to yoga.  Yoga has come to describe the travel when in fact it was first used to describe the goal/final state.  Ha-tha yoga describes union of polarities and this has come to mean a series of physical postures. There is no way with higher value than the other and that is where some “yoga traditions” get into problems. You see ha-tha yoga school who claim that they have secret initiations from the original tradition. In my opinion there is something suspicious about secrecy and I want to practice something that has been proved by scientists. There is nothing secret about ha-tha yoga and it is a tradition in constant change . When you see thin male yogis in India  wearing a loincloth and a smiling women in leotards they both claim to follow the original tradition. 200 years ago practically no women did ha-tha yoga at all. Traditionally only men were initiated into this kind of training and Sivananda (roughly 100 years ago) described how he introduced ha-tha yoga to women in India, they had great difficulty doing it in their Sari and some other outfit had to be worn.  In India ha-tha Yoga was only taught to a selected few in and this was controlled partly by the caste system. Yoga for women has developed through trial and error in the last 100 years. Here is where my concern about secrecy come to mind again. We must let doctors, physiotherapists and scientists look at Ha-tha Yoga and evaluate it and be open to their findings.

Since most of the ha-tha yoga tradition is based on an oral tradition and it was written down not so long time ago there is big room for change and adaptation.

Ha-tha Yoga spread out of the small circles and became a mainstream activity. Ha-tha Yoga became something that is available through CD, DVD, internet, training in group, personal training etc.