‘The history of Yoga is rooted in spiritual practice’

How I got into yoga & meditation

I was raised by staunch atheist parents. From a young age, I was interested in big existential questions. I remember being somewhat unconvinced by my parents’ answers to these – they held the default physical materialist viewpoints of our society. I was troubled by the idea that the people I most trusted seemed to have no clue what the purpose was behind life, or how the universe came to be.

As a teenager, I became very interested in altered states of consciousness after getting into smoking weed. I was astounded at the power of drugs to transform my perception of the world – in ways that felt profound and meaningful to me. I had a vague sense that perhaps meditation was a way to alter consciousness without the expense or hassle of acquiring weed from sketchy drug dealers.

I remembered reading that one of the possible effects of LSD was to make you feel like you were the universe. This sent a shiver down my spine – it seemed at once incomprehensible and totally compelling. I began to explore spiritual teachings and philosophy, and found that experiences such as this were reported by yogis, meditators and mystics of all kinds.

So at the age of 16 or so I first tried meditation. It was totally underwhelming. I just sat there, screwed my face up a little bit in the effort to make something happen, and spent a few minutes wondering if I was doing it right, before giving up. I tried it a few more times, but had neither the determination nor the guidance to establish a habit of regular meditation.

Over the next 8 or so years, I found myself occasionally inspired to pick up meditation again. In my mid-twenties, meditation started getting a whole lot easier. I had stopped drinking, something which I knew sapped my energy, my integrity and my motivation. I was eating well and exercising a lot. The conditions of my life were much more favourable for meditation practice to take root. Meditation became a regular habit. It was around then that I went to my first yoga class.

My first experience of yoga was a mixed bag. My hamstrings were incredibly tight as a regular cyclist. My body struggled to make shapes that the teacher was suggesting. I also found it difficult to translate the verbal instructions into how I might actually arrange my body. I also had some aversion and judgement towards the teacher, who I perceived to be hopelessly ungrounded and new-agey.

Given this, I was surprised to find that after the 90 minute class, I felt clear, settled and invigorated. Despite the class being mostly an awkward experience of not getting it, not being able to do things and not enjoying the general vibe, I found my nervous system and body had responded positively to it.

Based on this experience, I started watching YouTube yoga videos. This particular video really had a profound effect on me. The combination of pranayama and moving with the breath made me feel so much clearer and lighter after an hour of practice.

For the next year or so I would regularly practise by myself, occasionally trying out a yoga class in Bristol, with mixed results – but discovering that there were some yoga teachers that did teach in a way that appealed to me.

A couple of years into my explorations with yoga, I began to commit much more time and energy to meditation practice. I started going on retreats regularly, and found myself totally enchanted by the possibilities that opened up through meditation practice (mainly in Buddhist or Buddhist-derived traditions such as Insight Meditation and Mahasi).

I experienced some wondrous moments on my first longer silent retreat. Moments where the cloud of fuzz that I normally experience as “me” dissolved into fresh air, and my experience of myself and the world felt utterly undivided, immediate and stainless. I can remember vividly the sense of freedom from not being caught in identification with the body/mind.

I could write so much more about my journey of meditation and yoga practice, but in the interests of keeping to 3000 words I’ll pause here and get into the topic of yoga and spiritual practice more generally.

Yoga – a short history

The word yoga can be translated and interpreted in many different ways.  James Mallinson explains that:

The word yoga may designate either a practice, or body of practices, on the one hand, or the goal of such practices on the other. While today it may be more common to understand “yoga” as practice (of posture, breath-control, meditation and so on), in a majority of texts the word yoga more commonly indicates the goal achieved through these practices – although the perceived nature of that goal may vary according to the text’s doctoral underpinning. (Mallinson and Singleton, 2017)

So for now, let’s just say yoga (or a yoga) is some kind of spiritual practice that comes with some sense of the goal, or direction of that practice. We could call that direction awakening. The analogy of the goal of practice as waking up from a dream goes back to at least the time of the Buddha – Buddha literally meaning “awakened one”. I’ve picked the word “direction” carefully – I don’t subscribe to a view of awakening as an instantaneous arrival at a final destination, although there’s not enough space to argue for that view here.

Visions of awakening

A conception of awakening, and the conception of the path leading there, go together hand-in-hand. For example, Patanjali describes the practice of yoga as the stilling of the movements of sensory impressions in consciousness, and its corresponding goal as resting in and as pure awareness:

Patanjali (pg 137): REF

Yoga is to still the patterning of consciousness

Then pure awareness can abide in its very nature

Implied in most understandings of awakening is a sense of moving towards a greater understanding of the truth or nature of self, existence and experience, for example in Nisargadatta Maharaj:

The effort to understand yourself is Yoga. Be a Yogi, give your life to it, brood, wonder, search, till you come to the root of error and to the truth beyond the error (Maharaj, 2012)

In Mahayana Buddhism, the goal of the practice is recognised to be beyond all words and concepts, utterly inconceivable, and bound up with realisation of the emptiness of all things (the lack of inherent existence of defined, separate objects or properties – the understanding that all things are unfathomable, void-like but at the same time somehow incorporating the whole of creation in their being). Liberation is then equated with this clear knowing of emptiness (which, I would argue, can be seen as one way of describing non-duality)

All things in samsara and nirvana… all existents, phenomena, appearances, and non-existents, all these functional realities are inseparably of one taste with the quintessential nature of emptiness… All share in the vastness of the great coalescence. The wise who realize this truth no longer see mind, but only wisdom-mind. They no longer see living beings, only Buddhas. They no longer see phenomena, only the quintessential nature. (Mullin 2006)

Tantric traditions include in their conception of awakening a realisation of the divinity of all things. This is present in many of the aforementioned traditions, but most explicitly brought out in Tantric teachings. Christopher Wallis describes a tantric view of awakening as:

…a recognition that one’s real identity is that of the highest Divinity, the Whole in every part. (Wallis 2013)

Non-duality

All of these conceptions of awakening could be described as nondual, at least in the common meaning of nonduality as the lack of any true or real distinction between subject and object. Dualities of different kinds remain in some of these paths. I will not take the time to argue over which of these are “truly” nondual, but even in Patanjali and early Buddhism, the everyday perception of a separate self as the subject of experience has no place in ultimate reality, so these early traditions are still nondual in the common meaning of nonduality.

Modern spiritual paths

Spirituality in the 21st century is incredibly diverse, multifaceted and confusing. There are probably thousands of practices that people are doing in the name of spirituality. Some of these bear some resemblance to what might have been practised by Patanjali, Buddha, Abhinava Gupta, and many are novel creations, or hybrids of different traditions.

My opinion is that there are some ways that spiritual practice, and yoga, have been enhanced, or added to, by modern innovations, and some ways that it has been diminished, flattened, boxed-in and reduced to the modern humanist worldview.

My hunch is that many of the ways that yoga has been both helpfully augmented and unhelpfully truncated relate to the great Western contribution to spirituality: psychology.

First, the helpful influences of psychology.

A wider path – psychological development as a new aspect of awakening

In the traditional view of awakening (of which I am taking Patanjali and Buddha as being typical), there’s not much difference between one awakened person and the next. The goal of practice is to remove all obscurations to the undifferentiated transcendence of nirvana or samadhi. There’s no real place for the flourishing of oneself as an individual. In fact, anything done for the sake of personal development would probably be seen as antithetical to the cutting away of illusion – why invest in the flourishing of a self that is really a delusional projection?

The tantric path leaves a little more room for psychological development, with its allowing of worldly concerns as part of the path. Tantric deities embody different qualities that one can bring into one’s own being as a support for practice.

Western psychology, as a path of practice, is much more about the transformation, deepening and flourishing of the individual. Carl Jung held a vision of the development of the human psyche as a process of uncovering and integrating unconscious archetypes that move through us, not by forcefully cajoling the psyche to change, but by allowing, embracing and understanding the myriad drives that govern us (Vervaeke, n.d.).

The discovery of personal meaning in one’s life, and the embodying of our deepest, fullest expression of our potential, are now included in many ways that awakening is thought of in the modern West. Transcendent spiritual insight without personal psychological and emotional growth is no longer “enough” in modern cultures. To me, this represents a deepening, or perhaps more accurately a broadening, of what awakening means.

Practising in a traditional (Patanjali, Buddha) way leaves little room for our human emotions, desires and sense of meaning and purpose. These may be useful insofar as they help our quest to transcend all things, but are not valued in and of themselves. These days, practitioners engaging in this kind of very purist, transcendent path might be accused of “spiritual bypassing”. The denial of value to our emotions and desires offends our modern intuitions, and many people would now be sceptical of anyone claiming some degree of awakening who didn’t show emotional maturity, skill in dealing with others, and a life imbued with purpose.

In modern yoga classes, we see psychology brought in as an addition to the chakra system – associating certain qualities with each chakra, and the idea that by working with specific parts of the body (using awareness, visualisation or movement) we can awaken, unblock or strengthen certain psycho-emotional capacities. Anodea Judith elaborates this mapping of chakras with psychological ideas:

Based on their location in the body, the chakras have become associated with various states of consciousness, archetypal elements, and philosophical constructs. The lower chakras, for example, which are physically closer to the earth, are related to the more practical matters of our lives – survival, movement and action. (Judith, 2006)

In my view, this is a good thing. Awakening has found new territory to explore! However, we need to be careful not to totally lose the power of the traditional paths. 

The reduction of spirituality to psychology, self-improvement, relaxation etc.

The addition of the lenses of Western psychology as facets of awakening is, for me, an interesting and welcome development. However, as modern Western humans who are much more familiar with those lenses than the ideas of the Indian traditions, we have a habit of flattening everything into our psychological box.

Joshua Schrei in the Emerald podcast says:

Countless yoga teachers post psychotherapeutic lingo as if it’s traditional yogic wisdom…now that is psychology vernacular, fundamentally changing the scope of how we experience certain things when all of the once inextricable animism and magics of Buddhism get forgotten. And Buddhism is presented as almost indistinguishable from the psychotherapeutic process. (Schrei, 2023)

Over the years that I’ve been practising meditation, I’ve heard spiritual practice flattened in a depressing array of ways. When I Googled “What is a spiritual awakening?” to get a sense of the internet’s view of awakening, the first result was an article from Glamour magazine:

A spiritual awakening is really coming back to yourself, and it’s an awareness of a new reality, and who you truly are. You’ll feel called to uncover the true meaning and purpose of life, and once you start, there’s no real going back. You start questioning reality, the government, consumerism, and people’s intentions. EVERYTHING. It’s like in The Matrix, when Neo takes the red pill…

…One thing I do know? It’s not love and light. It is facing and healing what hurt you. It’s a lot of crying, feeling alone and being scared. (Nast, 2023)

Common ways that spirituality gets flattened include:

• Awakening = healing trauma
• Awakening = just being aware of your psychological “stuff”
• Awakening = unblocking/balancing all of your chakras, so that you’re energetically and psychologically balanced
• Awakening = “living your best life”

All of these could have some claim to be an important part of awakening, but none is anything like a full or deep enough vision. These truncated versions of awakening are poor substitutes for the profound shifts in perspective described by the Indian traditions.

Modern yoga classes

There is an enormous diversity in what is taught under the umbrella term “yoga”. But let’s talk about yoga classes that are mostly spent practising asana – this is what most people understand when they hear the word “yoga”.

At first glance, many of these classes bear very little resemblance to the practices that would have been done by the yogis of the past. People move their bodies into postures that stretch and strengthen the body, often with detailed anatomical explanations. Perhaps there is some guidance on using the breath with the movement. Sometimes chanting the mantra om, or less commonly some other mantra. Perhaps a few minutes of meditation at the beginning or end of the class.

Modern yoga classes usually involve some of these themes:

• Physical flexibility, wellbeing and strength
• Relaxation, settling of the nervous system
• Gathering of attention/concentration
• Mindfulness
• Sense of a ritual space
• Community & connection with others

What does moving your body through a sequence of postures have to do with spiritual practice?

The body, heart (as in emotional faculties) and mind are completely inseparable. Emotions are felt in the body. Thinking correlates with bodily contraction (maybe very subtly, maybe very obviously). Emotions flavour thoughts, thoughts provoke emotions, the body receives and reflects all of this and gives us our embodied experience.

As such, any practice that affects one of these centres of experience will affect the others too. Meditating a lot (for example on retreat) makes me more flexible, as the constant low-level tension that my body/heart/mind typically holds throughout life fades to a lower level, and this is reflected in a drop in physical tension, which allows more flexibility.

Physical asana practice uses the breath and the body to (among other things) move from sympathetic to parasympathetic nervous system activation. When the parasympathetic nervous system (associated with rest and relaxation) is more active, and the sympathetic nervous system (associated with fight/flight response) is less active, wellbeing and “positive” emotions result (Kop et al., 2011).

With this settling of the nervous system and release of physical tension, a sense of greater openness and connection is possible. I believe that this opening and unwinding of tension and resistance is continuous with spiritual experiences of oneness. We could describe a spectrum of openness, with states of intense contraction, separateness and suffering at one end, and at the other end states of such openness that the boundary between the individual and everything else is no longer experienced (a so-called “non-dual experience”). While these glimpses of oneness are not the entire point of spiritual practice, they are certainly in the direction of awakening, and are important and beautiful milestones on the spiritual path (Burbea, 2014).

Practices like asana, pranayama and meditation are all effective at moving us along this spectrum – maybe just a little bit, from a state of contraction to a state of a little less contraction.

So, if we wanted to be really generous to the kinds of yoga that offer nothing more than physical postures and movements with the breath, we could point out that they are (hopefully) shifting us into a state of less contraction, in the general direction of awakening.

Although, if we take this approach, we could see anything that’s even slightly relaxing as also being a spiritual practice. This seems like way too broad a definition of spiritual practice, but I make this point to show that there is no clear boundary between what is and isn’t an authentic spiritual practice.

Now I’ll argue the opposite case.

Modern yoga is often pretty much just physical exercise

It’s possible for anything to be a spiritual practice, really. Spirituality is inherently hard to pin down into neat boxes. This allows us to interpret a wide range of things as being potentially spiritual practices.

However, it’s clear that many yoga classes today are very far from being taught with any intention for them to be a spiritual practice. Often, yoga teachers are operating from a strictly physical (and maybe psychological) perspective, offering guidance on using the body to get into various shapes, but not offering any deeper yogic teachings or practices.

Is it OK to call that yoga? Does that constitute cultural appropriation? It’s definitely something much closer to gymnastics than what the Indian traditions would have recognised as yoga. The meaning of words changes through time, and so I don’t have the opinion that yoga classes need to rebrand themselves as something else, but we need to be clear that there’s yoga and there’s yoga.

The debate on cultural appropriation in the yoga world is interesting to me. It’s difficult for me to come to a concrete viewpoint on it all. I can only really share what feel to me like the most heinous kinds of crimes against the tradition.

I personally don’t feel that the yoga classes that are entirely devoid of spiritual pretence are particularly a problem – they’re not trying to be anything other than physical exercise. I suppose there is the danger that someone might draw the conclusion that the whole Indian yogic tradition boils down to physical flexibility and strength. But I am not convinced that this is a widespread misconception.

What feels more pernicious to me is when yoga “looks” spiritual but the teachings are being misrepresented, or presented in a watered-down fashion.

This happens when a yoga teacher is trying to teach something that they themselves have not really understood at any deep level. Some common ways this shows up:

• Offering mantra without understanding the mantra, or not having practised it themselves
• Buddha/deity statues used just to create a particular aesthetic
• Flattening of the Indian traditions to psychology
• Giving incorrect or shallow interpretations of teachings

When I experience this kind of thing, my cultural appropriation cringe reaction comes online. Of course, my cultural appropriation cringe reaction is that of someone born in the UK, with no cultural heritage from anywhere that yoga was traditionally practised. I understand that people with Indian backgrounds may have different reactions to me. And surely not everyone with an ancestral/cultural connection to the yogic tradition will react in the same way.

My own attitude is to treat the teachings from the Indian tradition with respect, by understanding them as fully as I am able (both theoretically and in my own practice), and to not offer anything that I haven’t spent a decent amount of time practising myself.

Final thoughts

This essay was quite challenging for me to write. Partly because I am very out of practice at this kind of writing, and partly because the topics are so wide-ranging and nuanced.

I already knew that any way of conceiving of yoga would be riddled with potential contradictions and paradoxes, and this manifested in me frequently picking holes in my own arguments. I chose to omit a lot of that hole-picking, as it mostly felt like a distraction. But I can’t help shake the feeling that I’ve somehow said too much about what’s ultimately unsayable. This is interesting to me, as I often come up against this in my meditation teaching – a sense that I have spoken with too much specificity about a territory that is mysterious, open and unfathomable.

Part of me would love to systematise spiritual practice more, with stages, steps, techniques and so on. And another part of me knows that to do so will always be to truncate, contort and pin down something beautiful and ungraspable by words. I will continue to inhabit this paradox, with curiosity and as much humility as I can muster!

Mallinson, J. and Singleton, M. (2017). Roots of yoga. London: Penguin Books.

‌Maharaj Nisargadatta (2012). I am that : talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj. Durham, Nc: Acorn Press.

Mullin, G.H. (2006). The Practice of the Six Yogas of Naropa. Snow Lion.

Wallis, C.D. (2013). Tantra Illuminated The Philosophy, History, and Practice of a Timeless Tradition. Mattamayura Pr.

Vervaeke, (n.d.). Ep. 49 – Awakening from the Meaning Crisis – Corbin and Jung – Meaning Crisis Collection. [online] Available at: https://www.meaningcrisis.co/ep-49-awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-corbin-and-jung/ [Accessed 24 Mar. 2024].

The Emerald: The Revolution Will Not Be Psychologized. [online] Available at: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-revolution-will-not-be-psychologized/id1465445746?i=1000600711232.

Judith, A. (2006). Eastern body, western mind psychology and the chakra system as a path to the self. Kolkata Alchemy.

Nast, C. (2023). What does a spiritual awakening feel like, and how do you navigate one? [online] Glamour UK. Available at: https://www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/article/what-does-spiritual-awakening-feel-like [Accessed 29 Feb. 2024].

Kop, W.J., Synowski, S.J., Newell, M.E., Schmidt, L.A., Waldstein, S.R. and Fox, N.A. (2011). Autonomic nervous system reactivity to positive and negative mood induction: The role of acute psychological responses and frontal electrocortical activity. Biological psychology, [online] 86(3), pp.230–238. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2010.12.003.

Burbea, R. (2014). Seeing that frees : meditations on emptiness and dependent arising. Leicester: Hermes Amāra Publications.