Deconstructing "Yoga"

As I prep for my two month yoga teaching stint in India, gathering my lecture notes and papers, I am constantly running up against this truly western, Enlightenment era compulsion to construct linear histories, where event A leads to event B leads to event C, in the context of which everything is getting better and becoming more perfect (thanks Hegel). Open any basic book on yoga and this colonialist tendency to appropriate and determine different cultures according to one's philosophic and historical framework is right in front of you: clay seal at found at Harrapa indicates yoga, followed by proto-Yoga in the Vedas, Upanisadic yoga gave rise to Patanjali, directly descended from him was Swatmarma and Hatha Yoga, in whose foot steps BKS Iyengar and other modern yogis follow. This is simply not the case!

As conscientious practitioners and teachers of yoga, there is a huge responsibility to not simply follow the path of least resistance and cave into this often racist and pejorative tendency to construct linear histories of yoga, but we must discover how this linear history emerged and deconstruct it by uncovering the many sources and influences that contributed to "yoga history" which deserve attention in their own right. In the case of what we call yoga, there are tremendous influences from Ayurveda, Tantra, western science and western physiology, amongst other systems of knowledge, which have created this funny practice we do at our local gym, studio, or under our guru (skst: heavy). In fact these influences are so tremendous that it is nearly impossibly to point to a certain practice or monolithic tradition that can rightly be called "Yoga" outside the intermingling of these systems. Yoga is a constantly changing, fluid and emergent practice that is not monolithic or particularly Indian in origin although the word may be Sanskritic.

Furthermore, there is this very modern compulsion to look towards science to legitimate practices, beliefs, and communities. If science corroborates, even loosely or by extension the axioms of a system or group, then there is a stamp of approval given to the continuation existence of that system. As the Dalai Lama says, if science disproves any of our practices, then those practices must be abandoned. Within modern yoga there is a strong current of thought that seeks to identify prana (skst: energy), chakras (skst: wheel), and kundalini (skst: a goddess and the serpent force at the base f the spine) with breath, glands, and the spinal column and nervous system. Again, this juxtaposition and superimposition of modern physiology onto the tantric subtle body of hatha yoga is a product of poor history and the colonialist tendency of commandeering the "native, unscientific, and religious" and turning them into "the scientific and secular" in order to make those practices justifiable and amenable to western tastes. To construct this modern veneer over distant practices and beliefs, we pejoratively whitewash the motivations, culture, and methods of, in this case, the medieval traditions and practitioners who practiced yoga as a religious rite and whose divinized subtle body was central to the efficacy of their practice. Although it may seem to be the case that the pineal gland corresponds to the ajna chakra (skst: wheel of wisdom) located at the third eye, it is inappropriate for us, as intelligent and thoughtful human beings, to make this identification without addressing what we are overlooking and calling attention to what is marginalized by this western compulsion: to examine whose histories we are discounting and what realities we are marginalizing.