History of Yoga

Many people who take up yoga practices today, very often ignore the history of yoga as such, and it is definitely unjust to consider yoga a simple way of promoting great physical health and nothing more. The practice of yoga takes spiritual growth as the ultimate goal, and its roots go back five thousand years BC, in the Upanishads. Starting from the Indus Valley, the history of yoga includes a whole set of practices that have been passed on to this day. Thus, in order to initiate spiritual growth, the practitioner has to constantly work to achieve the union of the limited and transitory self with its eternal dimension known as Brahman.

According to the history of yoga, by Brahman we imply God as the eternal omnipresence that is inherent to all aspects of reality. The principles found in yoga history are definitely quite apart from Christian tradition if we consider just this aspect of the differentiation between man and God. If man's main issue and fault is sin in the Christian approach, according to yoga doctrine, ignorance is the one that causes human frailty and failure. Modern yoga practitioners should be well informed on the type of challenge they would have to face by taking up this ancient tradition: the two aspects of the practice, physical and spiritual cannot be separated, since they aim at superior enlightenment.

The study of the history of yoga relies on the teachings found in the Vedas, a compilation of three-thousand-year old texts. Even archaeological findings have brought the evidence of yoga practice in the ancient times under the form of statues in yoga postures. There are several periods in the history of yoga as such, with the vedic stage followed by the pre-classic, classic and post-classic variants. Each of them brings something new in terms of the way the human being is regarded in relation to the world and the self. Nevertheless, the central teachings remain unmodified.

Presently, the history of yoga has entered a new phase of evolution: this is the modern or the universal approach to the ancient tradition, as more than thirty million people practice it on a daily basis. Yoga conquered the modern western perspective as new attitudes towards spirituality, life style, health and society were necessary. Yoga brought the chance of standing up and facing the battles of a poisonous and poisoned environment where stress, pollution, competition, consume and so on have become daily realities.