Yoga Like In India

While completing a series of articles for our yoga web site on the origins of yoga, I reflect on the way yoga has traveled and changed over time.  This brings to mind a frequent discussion amongst teachers about who is teaching yoga “the way it is taught in India.”

Actually, yoga has been taught and practiced in many different ways in India, sometimes as a devotional practice (as bhakti), sometimes as a practice of discipline and austerities (by renouncing worldly goals and pleasures) and sometimes as an expression of the dance between the material world and the spiritual world (in tantric practices).

Change, resulting in different approaches to yogic practices, is the nature of yoga in India.� And so it continues as it migrates to different places.  The current rage for yoga outside of India is often criticized for being not like “yoga in India.”  Next time you hear this, ask which yoga and from where is the person claiming their definition.