What is yoga? You asked Google – here’s the answer | Swami Ambikananda Saraswati

The answers you get to this will depend on who formulates the response. The sleek 30-something clad in organic cotton leggings with a healthy glow might answer, while holding “plank pose” for an excruciating length of time, that yoga is about being simultaneously buff and chilled out. Ask a grizzly old Hindu monastic like myself and you’re likely to get a more knotty and byzantine response.

We humans are explorers. As soon as we stood upright we set out to explore the planet, taking fire with us. In the Shanidar cave high on the Bradost mountain of Iraq, rest skeletons respectfully laid in a foetal position, on beds of flowers gathered from the valley below. Each skeleton has artefacts useful for an afterlife carefully placed to hand. They may date back as far as 65,000 years and belonged to Neanderthals. Thus it seems that all branches of humanity were explorers, peering into the veil of death. We have always asked questions such as “What is all this?” and “Where did it all come from?”, and, most maddening of all, “Who am I?” That, we can speculate, is how all religion, philosophy and science were born. That is how yoga was born.

Now, as ever, we live poised at the edge of an abyss, not knowing what the next moment will bring. And in this age of the ascendancy of science, that edge has grown closer – and the abyss deeper – in our consciousness: we are a “biological accident”, so nearly not, and yet here we are, crying out like the poet Rabindranath Tagore: “When should I find myself complete in myself?”

In India, once the ancient hymns and rituals of the Vedas (the cornerstone texts of Hinduism) had been formulated, and once the great Indus Valley civilisation had risen and turned to dust, a group of people, women as well as men, gave up the cities and went into the forests – to become known as the aranyakas (forest dwellers). The core ritual of the Vedas was the sacred fire ceremony. The aranyakas internalised exploration, taking the heat and light of their sacred fire into the darkness within as they sought to understand consciousness. In the forests they contemplated truths that had been handed down for centuries by word of mouth. Their contemplations became the final portion of the Vedas, called the Upanishads. It is the Upanishads that crystallised the teachings of yoga.

The word Upanishad means, roughly, teachings received when you have drawn close: they are for dedicated students, the seekers who hang around asking persistent questions. The Katha Upanishad is one such teaching, in which a young seeker becomes disillusioned with the status quo and as a consequence is condemned to death. In a dialogue with death he is given the very first recorded teaching of yoga as a means of understanding life.

This teaching begins by acknowledging that, “moment by moment”, we are faced with choosing a more meaningful response than our habitual knee-jerk reaction. This, then, is the first definition of yoga: walking through the fire of refusing our first reactions, knowing that while we might not choose our circumstances, we can choose our responses to them.

Many Upanishads continued this exploration of yoga, but around 250 BCE (a date not set in stone) a remarkable philosopher delineated the quest of yoga in what has become known as the Patañjali Yoga Sūtra. This articulation of yoga became established as one of the six orthodox philosophies of Hinduism.

These sutras hold meaning for us when the perennial questions about what we are, what our existence is, whether it has any meaning at all, arise anew. The word sūtra means “thread”: we reach for that thread to navigate the abyss and reach for the deep, in search of our “complete” self. The very first word of these sūtras is “atha”, meaning “now”. It is a word that is also a symbol, something sacred, something pregnant with meaning: it was the now in which the Sage Patañjali delivered its message; it is the now in which I contact that teaching; it is the now of my readiness to be open and receptive to it – and when I am, that is yoga.

The Sage Patañjali defined yoga as “the stilling of the movement of thought in the mind” in order to “know the true self”. He had adopted an even more ancient philosophy that held that while the idea-of “I”, the socially constructed self, was a mirage – behind it, masked by it, was an immanent and universal “self” worth the search. Yoga is a means whereby that search is made.

In the centuries that followed, yoga became the sap nourishing the mighty tree of Hinduism, flowing into every branch of its rich philosophy while always remaining rooted in the Vedas. From the 18th century onwards, as India was colonised, yoga travelled to Europe and academics took to translating its many texts into their own languages.

Then, in 1893, at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago, a fiery, saffron-clad Hindu monk, Swami Vivekananda, stood up and began his brief speech with the address: “Brothers and sisters of America … ”, bringing the audience to its feet for a two-minute standing ovation. Vedic philosophy had burst upon the west, bringing yoga with it – and we embraced it. Yoga is now ubiquitous. It appeals because it offers us a means to deal with ancient questions that cannot be suppressed.

What is yoga? Despite its global travel, it remains all that we do to still the mind in order to know the true and universal self. So, is the well-toned figure sweating it out on the yoga mat doing yoga? Yes, by using the body the yogi trains the attention to handle the perennial questions. But the person walking their dog beside the river and contemplating the truth behind self, life and death, is also doing yoga. The beauty of yoga is that it meets us wherever we are and then invites us to continue the exploration – like young Nachiketas, the seeker in the Katha Upanishad, questioning even death.

My own yoga teacher, a Himalayan monk called Swami Venkatesananda, said: “Yoga is all those practices that enable us to discover health – which is not the absence of the symptoms of sickness, but which is wholeness and holiness, an inner state of being in which there is no division at all.”

What is yoga? You asked Google – here’s the answer | Swami Ambikananda Saraswati

Selling yoga back to its teachers is pure neocolonialism | Swami Ambikananda Saraswati

This week began with the proverbial storm in a teacup as the British public were warned we were in danger from … yoga. On Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday, the British Wheel of Yoga’s chair, Paul Fox, claimed that teachers without sufficient training are giving yoga classes. What has since emerged is that the British Wheel, one of the wealthiest yoga organisations in the UK, has agreed to provide Skills Active, a quango, with funding to develop a National Occupational Standard for Yoga – to protect and keep us all safe in down dog.

As I listened in the Radio 4 studio, it was clear that this misrepresentation of what is happening in most yoga classes is a pretext for a kind of neocolonialism. When powerful organisations seek control, they always say it’s to “protect the public” and “keep them safe”. Are these not the claims put forward by any group seeking to impose its authority and undermine all other groups existing alongside it? A meta-analysis of studies on yoga by Dr Holger Cramer of the University of Duisburg-Essen confirms that it is as safe as other physical movement disciplines.

In the days of the British Raj, when Britain’s economy depended on commodities such as cotton, Indian cotton growers were forced on pain of imprisonment to sell their cotton yields to Britain at prices determined by the buyer. The raw cotton was sent back here, to our “satanic mills”, and Indians – who had been weaving cotton for centuries – were then prohibited from weaving their own and forced to buy woven cotton back at prices determined by Britain. That wouldn’t happen today – would it?

The art and science of yoga, which began in India, has become big business all over the world. According to Ibisworld, in the UK alone Yoga is worth about £790m a year. Nonetheless, yoga continues to be the ancient path of Hindu mysticism, and its first how-to manual, called the Katha Upanishad, dates back between 2,000 and 3,000 years, and forms part of sacred Hindu texts. In it a young man encounters Death and a dialogue between them ensues. Death is asked about the meaning of life and offers yoga as a way of understanding it all. A National Occupational Standard dismisses this spiritual connection and replays the cotton trick: giving the British stamp of approval to a particular brand of yoga and then – under the guise of health and safety – selling it back to the teachers who are already teaching it.

The financial penalty for not complying is a tax that will hit self-employed teachers, most of whom are women

Of course, yoga teachers, like all teachers, always need to improve on their training, but this proposal is just a way of paying a bureaucracy to ensure a two-tier system: some teachers get the stamp and others don’t. It won’t improve the training, but it will make it much more expensive and limit who can afford it. The financial penalty for not complying is a tax that will hit self-employed teachers, most of whom are women. A better use of resources might have been to finance research into exactly what areas of further training are needed.

A number of years ago yoga teachers formed the Independent Yoga Network to ensure that teachers applying to get on to the Register of Exercise Professionals had an acceptable level of training. The IYN undertook this without any financial compensation and in support of the diversity of yoga schools.

While yoga is part of their religion for over a billion people, it is not so for all those practising it in the UK. Many people do yoga for a sense of wellbeing – for aching backs, or muscle tension from a pressured week, or just a break from a 24/7 agenda. None of us has to change our religion – or even have one – to enjoy the benefits it offers. But nor should anyone try to misappropriate and redefine another’s religion in order to enjoy a bigger slice of yoga’s financial pie.

Is yoga dangerous? Absolutely! Here’s what it did for me: I was a young mum suffering from crippling postnatal depression that disengaged me from life when I encountered yoga. It changed all that and taught me, because I needed to learn it again, how to become a fully participating human being. Becoming engaged always makes us dangerous – we become participators rather than merely spectators – and we see very clearly when the cotton is being pulled over our eyes.

Selling yoga back to its teachers is pure neocolonialism | Swami Ambikananda Saraswati