Yoga's Hidden History: From Yoking the Senses to Mysore Palace Workouts

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Modern yoga classes focus on fitness and flexibility, but this episode shows how far that is from the practice's origins. The Sanskrit word comes from a root meaning to attach, join, harness or yoke, a cognate of the English word yoke, and early texts used it as a metaphor for restraining the senses. The goal was soteriological: stilling the mind to reach moksha, liberation from the cycle of rebirth. Scholars debate whether yoga grew in a straight line from Vedic ritual or emerged from a synthesis with non-Vedic practices. Early hints appear in the Upanishads, the word takes its modern sense in the Katha Upanishad, and Patanjali's Yoga Sutras organized it into eight limbs, of which only one, asana, concerns the body, and it originally meant simply a seat.

The physical turn came in the 20th century. Swami Vivekananda presented yoga to the West as a science of the mind and left out the postures. In India during the 1920s and 1930s, amid nationalism and a global physical culture craze, figures such as Sri Yogendra and Swami Kuvalayananda applied medical paradigms to Hatha practices. At the Mysore Palace, T. Krishnamacharya taught boys athletic standing poses adapted partly from British military calisthenics, and his students Pattabhi Jois and B.K.S. Iyengar founded Ashtanga Vinyasa and Iyengar Yoga.

• The Katha Upanishad compares the senses to horses, the mind to reins, the intellect to a chariot driver and the self to the passenger.
• Patanjali's first two limbs, yama and niyama, are ethical rules that come before any posture or breathing.
• The sun salutation was pioneered in the 1920s by the Raja of Aundh as a daily exercise routine.
• A text from 1830 listed 84 postures, Iyengar's 1966 Light on Yoga about 200, and Dharma Mittra over 900 in 1984.
• The United Nations established an International Day of Yoga, and UNESCO lists yoga as intangible cultural heritage.