Yoga today

So when yoga moved to the West, no wonder it was met with some confusion. The ground for its introduction to the West was laid in 1893, with the arrival from India of Swami Vivekananda, who gained notoriety when he represented Hinduism at the world Parliament of Religions in Chicago. Soon after, the West's awareness of Indian philosophy grew, through the work of such groups as the Theosophical Society, founded in the US by Madame Blavatsky. The Society translated most of the ancient Indian philosophical texts available at the time, including an interpretation of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali by the English novelist and playwright Christopher Isherwood, a member of the Society. Other members of the Society included some of the most prominent intellectuals of the day such as Aldous Huxley, Frank Lloyd Wright and W. B. Yeats. For the next few decades, the West's interest in Indian philosophy continued to grow. An important voice for the universality of these teachings was the great philosopher and teacher J. Krishnamurti. With awareness of the philosophy grew an interest in the practice with which it was so closely linked – yoga. In 1935, the eminent Swiss psychologist Carl G. Jung even described yoga as 'one of the greatest things the human mind has ever created.' But it wasn't until the 1950s that an interest in Hatha Yoga really emerged, through the work of such teachers as BKS Iyengar, who taught both Europeans and Americans. One of his most distinguished pupils was the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who wrote the foreword for Iyengar's book Light on Yoga, published in 1966. By this time there were groups of people throughout the West practicing Hatha yoga.

It wasn't long before people from all over the world were travelling to India to discover yoga and the Vedic philosophy from which it emerged. Then with the Beatles' journey to India in 1968, to study Transcendental Meditation with their Guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, all that was Indian became firmly part of the hippy culture.

Through the 1970s and '80s, Hatha Yoga continued to have a healthy following in the West, although people who practised were generally considered to be a bit weird or simply old hippies. But all of that changed in the mid '90s, when people started to get bored with the 'no pain no gain' mindless gym culture. This coincided with the emergence in the West of a hitherto little known style of Hatha Yoga called Ashtanga. This style of yoga fitted in perfectly with the new mantra of 'perfect body, perfect mind', and was endorsed by such celebrities as Sting and Madonna. Within no time it was estimated that there were more people doing yoga in California than in all of India. According to Time Magazine, there are around eighteen million people doing yoga in America today; there is probably an equivalent number practising in Europe. So a centuries old discipline that started out preparing yogis to sit for long periods of time in meditation today finds a place in a society that may require help in sitting for long periods of time in front of a computer.

Compiled from extracts from the book Intelligent Exercise with Pilates and Yoga, published by Pan Macmillan July 2002.