Modern Yoga. It's Not All Bad

I am sometimes asked about how I feel about the modern transformation of yoga as it has spread throughout the world. Oftentimes the question includes a reference to the commercialization of yoga or its new emphasis on fitness.

While many 'traditionalists' tend to feel alarmed and may be threatened by the evolution which has taken place in the last 100 years or so I think that a lot of it has actually been for the better.

As for most topics I don't feel I belong to just one side of this debate. I value the ancient Indian tradition of yoga immensely. However I want to present in this essay the arguments in favor of the modern development.-

First let's recapitulate the common complaints I have been hearing over the years:

• It's all about money. Commercialization of yoga kills its spirit.
• Yoga is not physical fitness, it's about spirituality.
• Touchy feely new-agey

I'll first address these issues and then present the counter arguments.

Yoga$ Chitta Vritti Nirodhah

I actually do feel uncomfortable with the way yoga is often presented. Individuals or companies using yoga to fulfill their greed irks me. They will often distort the teachings to come to their selfish ends. But again if they do get an audience which relates to them and is happy to hand over loads of money, more power to them.

The plus side is that modern business understanding and practices have greatly contributed to the expansion of yoga, with its countless benefits, to the whole world and to the masses. When I first practiced yoga in the early eighties and taught it in the late eighties yogis were marginalized. While there is a thrill of specialness to being at the fringe of society I rejoice in witnessing nods of approval while telling somebody what 'I do' in life.

Yoga used to be little known and most folks even had a negative view of this whole thing. It's all over now.

The Fitness Trend

My view is that most practitioners focusing on the fitness dimension of yoga does not take away from the other aspects. Also a number of these practitioners will later explore other aspects of yoga after getting familiar with the purely physical dimension of it.

Think about it in mathematical terms.

Hypothesis 1 - the old way

Warning! These numbers are not accurate. I just made them up to make a point.

• Total practitioners of yoga: 100,000
• Meditation/philosophy adepts: 90,000
• Fitness yogis: 10,000

An impressive 90% of Spiritual Yogis, a figure that will rejoice the purists

Hypothesis 2 - modern situation

• Total practitioners of yoga: 50,000,000
• Meditation/philosophy adepts: 2,500,000
• Fitness yogis: 47,500,000

Only 5% of yogis have the spiritual bend. 'What a shame' will lament the purists.

Yes but it's 27 times as many people! Nothing is lost there at all.

New Age Yoga

Along many of my friends and colleagues I have often 'taken shots' at the confusion filled mumbo jumbo coming out of the modern new age cultural movement associated with yoga and many other disciplines.

I now realize that the so-called 'New Age' movement is much more than that as it also includes a new sensitivity on health, moral, ethical, and spiritual grounds.

Many of the points made below were gained as a direct consequence of the new age mentality.

Why Yoga Is Evolving in a Good Way

As fashionable as it is to complain about the ills of modern society I would not, if given the choice, switch to any era of the past, golden age or not.

Life is good these days, although not for everybody for sure. Most readers of this essay, and the author as well, live a privileged, comfortable, healthy, safe life which we owe to our modern times.

"Yes, but", you ask, "has yoga not been tainted, weakened, and devalued? Do we not get a poorer version of this sacred tradition in this materialistic society?"

No.

Let me present some of the modern improvements.

• Openness
• Ethics
• Tolerance
• Science & Pragmatism

Openness & Secrecy

Let's assume you lived in India a few hundred years ago and wanted to learn hatha yoga. First you need to find a guru. That guru needs to accept you before you can join his ashram and give you the training. In the majority of cases your chances would be close to nil if any of the following were true:

• You are not a Hindu
• You do not belong to the highest brahmin caste
• You are a woman
• The guru does not like you for some reason you will never know

Hatha Yoga, belonging to the tantric tradition, enables one to tap into tremendous spiritual and psychic power in the form of the kundalini shakti. Of course any power that can be beneficial has the potential to be destructive as well. This is the reason invoked for keeping these teachings under utmost secrecy. To such extent that very few would be exposed to it.

Consider this excerpt from the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, the foremost hatha yoga scripture.

Very typical and occurring more than once. One amongst many interpretations is that by talking too much about a practice and by divulging it its power is diluted.

Lack of literacy and education in ancient India and the prevalence of Sanskrit as the language of choice in yogic literature contributed a great deal to keeping many would be yogis out of the loop. Sanskrit is a live language but an acquired one, not one anybody learns as one's mother tongue. And yes the very few exceptions do confirm this rule.

Additionally all scriptures and writings kept an intended vagueness and fuzziness in the laying of the instructions to ensure the individuals could not really learn from them without a live guru anyway. This is often interpreted as a good thing and a sign of wisdom.

The Sharing of Knowledge

Modern culture, greatly based on science, posits that knowledge must be shared to benefit as many individuals as possible as well as society at large.

It all started with some great masters of the 19th/20th century such as Swami Vivekananada, Swami Sivananda, BKS Iyengar, etc. who led the way by breaking the secrecy status quo and revealing the hatha yoga vidya and other aspects of the teachings to the world at large freely and openly.

This contributed to a global dissemination of yoga. Modern practitioners and masters started writing manuals and books exerting to lay out the details as precisely and accurately as possible. Brilliant examples of this include the books by Indian masters BKS Iyengar and Swami Satyananada Saraswati as well as Belgian author André Van Lysebeth.

This early trend has only been amplified with the publication of massive amounts of literature in hundreds of languages and by the production of yoga instruction in audio and video forms. The technology changes (TV programs, cassette tapes, LP's, audio CD's, MP3's, VHS tapes, CD-Rom's, DVD's, Cloud hosting such as YouTube, etc..) but the trend towards the sharing and openness of knowledge keeps on accelerating.

The Internet Breaks All The Rules

During the early expansion of yoga some esoteric practices such as kriya yoga and other tantric practices were still kept secret but the internet, the great knowledge disseminator, has done away with all this. It's pretty much all out there now. Some modern teachers such as Yogani and his tens of thousands of disciples demonstrate that you can give it all away with precise and serious instructions and trust folks to use their common sense to avoid pitfalls and dangers.

Secret mantras and techniques which would command astronomical fees and cult like followings in the past, based on secrecy, are all available to anybody having half decent skills at using Google and other search engines.

I do not doubt for a moment that this democratization of knowledge is a good thing and a great service to humanity. Now each individual has the ability to research all the possibilities for personal development, try out different methods and go in great depth in any given field.

Do books, DVD's, and the internet replace having a live teacher? No, absolutely not. But they can lead many more keen students to find the teacher which they need and feel comfortable with.

The genie of knowledge is out of the bottle and it's not going back in!

Ethics

A crucial attribute of our modern culture is transparency. Any society can talk a good game about non-violence when parents and school teachers are beating up kids, priests are sexually abusing children, in-laws are burning murdering young widows, couples are killing babies because of their gender (hint: not because they are male), good folks are lawfully or unlawfully enslaved, etc.

All these problems still exist today but at least they are in the open, not swept under the rug. Did you know that there are more slaves now (2009) than in any other periods of history? Advocacy groups are fighting for the victims, laws are changed, solutions tried to be found. Do we live in a perfect world? No, but at least we don't pretend we do!

What does this have to do with yoga? Everything. For example most of us learned about ahimsa (non-violence) via yoga and/or Mahatma Gandhi.

Modern Western civilization is raising awareness of a deeper and subtler understanding of ahimsa. Example: the awareness that suffering to any animal is in clear violation of ahimsa. It's fundamental and at the heart of Indian culture you say? I respond that this may be the case in theory but, in practice, I'd rather be an American dog or a Swiss cow than their Indian homologues.

Extreme, horrible examples such as industrial animal testing, the Michael Vick dog fighting scandal and the existence of corridas only strengthen my point in light of the growing outrage that these medieval behaviors generate.

The Group & The Individual

Another essential development of modern ethics is the shift from a group centered culture to one revolving around the rights of the individual. Often this is argued to be a negative thing but when the group is higher than the individual it can be considered perfectly righteous to sacrifice any one or millions of individuals for the benefit of the group.

When the individual, nay every individual, is more important than the group solutions have to be found that benefit both group and all individuals. This applies to countries, religions, and organizations of all sizes.

An organization is an organism and it will oftentimes, to protect itself and just like any other organism, destroy any threatening foreign agents, be them inside or outside itself. In the case of religious and spiritual groups 'foreign agents' means people. Accepted behaviors of the past are shunned nowadays.

Throughout the ages religions have tended to protect the higher classes by exhorting lower class folks to be humble, meek, and subservient.

Modern yoga does not go along with that tendency. Yoga is supposed to empower the individual and does so whenever taught properly. Yoga should lead to freedom on all levels and modern yoga is not afraid to declare so.

Tolerance

Belonging to the Sivananda tradition of Saraswati swamis I feel very fortunate to follow the teachings of advaita vedanta in the school of Sankaracharya. It was presented to us by Swami Vishnu-devanandaji with a universal outlook and inherent tolerance to other spiritual paths and religions of the world.

By the way it's easier to be tolerant of a different religion located across the world than one situated just next door.

The quote above is meant as a joke. I could not find of a good setup for it but I can't let it go.

But most advaitins, just like dvaitins and members of all religions, like to think that their path is the best, the highest. These advaitins oftentimes condescend to be tolerant of other traditions saying that "There are different paths for different people. Advaita is like university and dualist paths are like kindergarten." LOL. What a joke! How can one be so insulting about other masters and fellow yogis with a straight face and feel good about oneself.

Of course Sankara himself had this "us against the world" attitude although I believe it's in part because of the tradition of commentary writing which stipulates that you need to demonstrate the validity of your arguments by showing the logic of your arguments and the fallacy of the other schools' tenets.

The 'E' Word

In modern or ancient discourse the word 'evil' is habitually used to make a strong emotional point which is not backed by much reason at all.

I'm deeply disturbed by the insistence of many vedantins, including great ones of the past, to praise Sankara for his greatest 'accomplishment': Kicking the Buddhists and their 'evil' doctrine out of India.

Leave aside for a moment the fact that most modern Indologists reject this theory as a fantasy and that some eminent ones go as far as saying that advaita vedanta borrows a great deal from buddhism, what is supposed to be so evil about buddhism?

Is it the eight-fold path? Is it teaching that desire is the cause of one's suffering and one should exert to eradicate desire to gain control over the mind and reach enlightenment? Is it the obsessive compulsion to develop as much compassion as possible? Is it the peaceful ways which are a hallmark of buddhist societies and communities everywhere? I just don't get it.

Oh no, wait, it's because the Buddha, trying to go back to the fundamental basics and essentials of spirituality refused to accept the omniscience and unfailingness of the vedas. That would and did weaken the power of the 'Man'. No one will ever get away with that.

What's New?

Not that much I'm afraid but many modern yogis hold as sacred principle that all religions are different paths leading to the same direction. Often going as far as saying that all religions are one and the same. I do disagree with the latter extreme viewpoint.

I think all religions and spiritual paths are about the same thing, eventually reaching the same goal, using different techniques, theoretical models, and terminology. I think, though, that some paths are more efficient than others, better at some aspects of spirituality and while many of those paths contain similarities they also have a great number of differences which we should not ignore for the sake of truth and clarity.

Different paths and traditions fit different people. What is the best path for me might not be for you and vice versa.

I suspect most of the readers will agree with that last sentence and that is a sign that there is a great deal of tolerance among modern yogis. Intolerant folks and groups say "My path, my group is the only and highest way to reach the goal. All others are deluded, will go to hell, etc."

Pragmatic Yoga

I like to think as my approach to yoga to be pragmatic.

On one hand countless yogis and masters came before us, made all types of experiments and drew some conclusions as to what works and what does not work. It would be foolish to ignore this body of knowledge and try to reinvent the spiritual wheel.

Because of this I'm a big advocate of the vedic tradition.

But on the other hand, at the end of the day, does the tradition come for the sake of helping us reach the state of freedom in the most efficiently possible way or is tradition the immovable end in and of itself which cannot be questioned, ever?

I think you know where I'm going with this. I prefer the former.

Some centuries ago and before that you would typically be born in a part of the world, be exposed to one brand or sub-brand of spirituality and be stuck with it for the rest of your life. The holy texts going with it were your texts, the final truth as far as you are concerned, and that's it. Never question. It's the word of God. If you follow anything else you'll be damned to hell forever ... Blah blah blah.

But guess what! The modern era of transportation and communication has made the world much smaller than it used to be. You can compare the different holy texts of different areas, different cultures, and different times of history. You can compare the different faiths.

Although it's politically incorrect to do it, it's highly beneficial to compare the strengths and weaknesses of all religions and faiths. At least the ones you are most familiar with. Trying to avoid making sweeping, stereotypical statements about teachings we don't know anything about is a good idea.

Practice This Now

Here is a quick exercise which you may want to take.

There are 3 questions. You have to think fast and write or enunciate your answers as quickly as possible. If the answers don't come fast that means you did not think enough about this. Doing the exercise slowly should be very helpful.

1. What are the 5 biggest weaknesses or pitfalls of your main spiritual or religious tradition?
2. What are the 5 biggest weaknesses or pitfalls of your main spiritual group or organization?
3. What are the 5 biggest weaknesses or pitfalls of your personal approach to yoga or spirituality?

... Keep reading once you are done ...

That was painful, right? I know. It helps develop tolerance though.

To make you feel better I'll suggest the following exercise which is similar.

1. What are the 5 biggest strengths or advantages of your main spiritual or religious tradition?
2. What are the 5 biggest strengths or advantages of your main spiritual group or organization?
3. What are the 5 biggest strengths or advantages of your personal approach to yoga or spirituality?

Similar exercises can be done for other faiths and other groups.

Conclusion

I don't have any. These are a few thoughts on modern and ancient yoga. I hope it will provide you with some food for thought and I look forward to hear your contributions to the topic.

Your comments are welcome on my Facebook wall. You will need to friend me first if you haven't already.