Yoga is so much more than the uplifting, mindfulness focused, work out its become! Let me inform you of a secretly bold and surprisingly rich tradition.
Here are 5 aspects of Yoga that might surprise you.
1. Yoga is Very Old:
Yoga is at least 4,000 years old but that’s a rough and more than likely modest estimate. There are three main pieces of evidence that shed light on yoga’s seniority. The first is a small clay stamp found in Western India, the second is a reference in the “Hindu Bible” the Bhagavad Gita, and the third is found in the shocking reliability of oral traditions.
The first bit of evidence is a clay seal dated to 2,200 BC. It’s a small one-inch-by-one-inch square of mud stamped with the image of a horned person meditating. Archeologists infer this person to be a shaman of sorts represented as a wild man or woman who is one with nature because there are animals stamped around the figure. The stamp suggests that meditation was already a well-established practice at this point in history because of the unique depiction of tangled and inverted legs alongside the unnatural poise and symmetry of the mystery figure.
The second piece of evidence is in the words of the Bhagavad Gita, which was written 2400 years ago. In its pages, it refers to yoga as an ancient practice, which means even to people 400 years before Jesus yoga was referenced to as a pearl of sacred wisdom that came from a time before theirs. So, where did it come from? There are some exciting claims that yoga came from ancient Egypt’s occult schools of mystery. Then, there are the more extravagant ideas that Egypt itself is a remnant of the fabled city of Atlantis. The interesting piece in all of this is that humans are creatures of history and they have always looked into the past for the insights of their ancestors!
So, just to give some credit and have some fun with the idea of Atlantis; Plato himself, the well-respected Greek philosopher of was interested in Atlantis and considered it to be a real place. He shared his beliefs in 360 BC inside the pages of Timaeus. If you dare to connect the dots in the story, Yoga becomes a legendary inheritance from a mythically advanced civilization. Real it or not, it gives the practice depth!
The last bit of information that supports the possibility that yoga is truly ancient is the reliability of oral traditions. India has a long history. It’s a truly ancient and continuing culture. Before the written word and the ease of computer memory Indian monks memorized huge bodies of work syllable by syllable in song, protecting their most prized ideas and stories for future generations.
Some evidence for the reliability of oral traditions comes from the oral stories of the aborigines of Australia, who had tales of giant and nonexistent Australian beasts. Modern anthropologists heard their stories and believed them to be true only after the fossils of these extinct animals were coincidentally discovered later on.
These animals died tens of thousands of years ago and forced these scientists to reevaluate how long aborigines have lived on that land and how long they had been memorizing their own history.
Every pose and breath is like an artifact of a time long passed, a message from elders who saw a different world and had different knowledge. To that point every class, every pose, and every breath is a celebration of the human story and how far back it really goes.
2. Yoga Poses Keep You Young:
As I get older I can feel my body becoming tighter. My muscles are tired. The tissues are worn. The web of connective tissue (fascia) is literally hardening. In those moments where I feel immobility creeping in, I usually think back and remember all the times I overheard someone older than me noticing the passing of time through their aging muscles and joints. It went in one ear and out the other. I also remember being a child and seeing my parents lose their energy as I continued to play. It was confusing and only considered for a second. I couldn’t have known the touch of time because I hadn’t experienced it yet. But now, time and I are better friends and I can appreciate the wilt of leaves and flowers with more sincerity.
We all know the body eventually breaks down. It’s not new news and its not fake news! Yogis were impacted by the puzzling and inevitable process of aging as well and devised a set of exercises to keep their energy flowing by consistently lengthening and opening their bodies.
The poses get deeper, though! I want to pay a small respect to the ancient yogi’s and their hyper-philosophical and shamanic minds because in those philosophies there are bigger and more exciting motivations. Yogi’s as shaman believe reality is elemental and the first element to be created was space. Space is the origin of everything and necessary before any other element can exist because without space there is no room for anything to be. So, as we build space in our bodies we provide a foundation for it to exist. That permission to exist translates thematically into longevity.
Poses at this point become rituals to the first element of creation, Akasha – ether or space. Space in the body becomes space in the mind. Space in the mind becomes space in the world.
So when you see someone in their forward fold, trying to get their face to touch their knees, consider they’re reaching for the beginning of things, stretching backward in time, and becoming younger by creating space (elementally) where before there was only increasing tension.
3. Yoga uses Breathing for Enlightenment:
If you go to a yoga class you might hear people breathing very loudly. It’s sort of distracting and definitely strange, at first. The most common breathing technique sounds just like Darth Vader. It’s called the Victorious Breath and over time its steady grumble starts to remind you of focus and power!
Yogis noticed that their breathing affected their body and their mind. So, they experimented with it. They held their breaths, hyperventilated, and hyperventilated in different patterns and in different ways to discover what breathing truly is and what it could do. They came to the conclusion that the breath controlled the mind.
By controlling the breath they increased their immediate presence and focus. More importantly than that, it increased their mental clarity. The practical value to this, and why it probably mattered to these people is because clear minds make far better decisions.
Yogis then started to think of breath as a universal energy source that strengthened their “third eye” or personal awareness. The biological reasons behind this are because breathing directly affects the nervous system and the nervous system directly affects the sorts of thoughts we have.
When I breathe deeply in a tough yoga pose, my nerves are literally relaxing, and my mind calms down. That affords me the space to remember why I chose to be in the pose. I am reminded of my self-control. I rely on breathing as a whole to increase mental clarity but I rely on the inhale and the exhale, in particular, for different reasons.
Inhaling comes with a rush of energy for the muscles and exhaling lessens the burn of the stretch by pumping out CO2, which is acidic. The inhale activates the fight or flight response in a small but discernible way, while the exhale activates the rest and digest response. By exaggerating their breaths the yogis, like athletes, would energize their tissues and activate their nervous systems with what they believed was “universal energy” to perform their practice at their best. What they were feeling however was the release of particular stress hormones and endorphins.
Now to the ancient yogis, every pose was a moment of ultimate victory, where the breath, focus, and energy were all amped-up and entwined into their present moment in the hopes of achieving enlightenment. To do that would try to focus as intensely as possible on and inside of themselves so much so that their lives and the world would disappear. They would sink into their enlightenment, forgetting their ambitions and worries while resisting the pull of distraction. When I see someone doing breathwork I see their effort as a rocket trying pull away from gravity. The rocket is their mind. The earth is their life, struggle, and success. The sky is nirvana. The blast of fire is their breath – their energy.
So when someone is breathing next to you in a yoga class consider that’s a person just working for their ultimate mental clarity by breathing a lot, collecting their oxygen, adjusting their nervous system, and focusing their minds.
4. Yoga has its own Theory of Spiritual Physics
The practice of Yoga comes out of a set of theories that explain the physical universe, just like Physics. The yogis appreciated that Life was constructed and worked according to certain patterns and laws. They boiled reality down to 5 elements, 3 forces, duality (as in two things), and a singularity (the thing that must’ve logically been there to “birth” reality - God). With these 11 concepts, yogis explained the whole world.
Yoga, from the poses to the breathing, is crafted with these 11 principles of Yoga Physics in mind. The idea is that these 11 “ingredients” are within everything and anything. They are the building blocks of the physical world.
In practice a yogi is trying to observe these principles in themselves, making their way all the way up to that conceptual singularity. So, instead of finding the answers to the universe out in the stars or in atoms like our scientists, they looked for the answers in certain experiences within themselves because every star, deity, mountain, and person are all made of the same things.
You see, where our physics is purely material and based on matter, the yogis’ physics were based on both matter and consciousness. The union of the two is what yogis believe is spirit. The first five elements are space, wind, fire, water, and earth. They represent the qualities of emptiness, movement, heat, connection, and solidity.
All five elements are governed by three natural forces that each come with their own color; stillness is black, movement is red, and harmony is white. These forces are a bit more abstract compared to the elements. Stillness refers to the absence of energy, whether it’s a cell losing its energy and dying, a person losing motivation, or an iPhone with no charge turning off.
Movement refers to the build-up and use of energy in any sense whether that’s an airplane lifting off, a volcano erupting, or an immune system defending the body from infection. It refers to the physical aliveness that comes hand in hand with being alive. A child has more of this “movement” force than an adult, a bird has more than a rock, and a cell has more than an atom.
Harmony is the force that makes it all work together. There isn’t only movement and only stillness there is a flow between the two. That effortless flow is the third force. It’s what connects life (movement) and death (stillness) into the congealed process we know as living. Yogis also say that these three forces are always working. So we’re never fully one or the other but always a combination of the three, always living, dying, and being born again.
The next pair of concepts in Yoga Physics is the mother and father of the universe, energy, and consciousness. The Mother or energy refers to matter and is what creates the 3 forces, the 5 elements, and everything else that comes from them; which is everything from atoms to skyscrapers. This energy is feminine, tangible and has many forms.
The consciousness that is aware of all of this energy is masculine, intangible, and singular. The two together are what is necessary to make any form of experience possible. The old “If a tree falls in a forest and no one’s there to hear it does it make a sound?” riddle plays into the necessity of consciousness and why yogi’s paired it with energy itself.
The singularity is the yogis best guess at what existed pre-big bang and what exists post-life. They say that before the big bang there was an unknowable nothing. This nothingness is what the yogi as a mystic was trying to understand through their practice. Because it was in that nothingness that they would find answers to three of our biggest questions as conscious beings. Who am I? Why am I here? What happens after death? These questions define the turmoil of being self-aware.
When a yogi reverse engineers themselves according to these 11 principles they come to a magnificent twist of answers. Rather than being something they experience their center as nothing. That recognition of inner-nothingness is the crux of inner peace. To be here for nothing, as nothing, and returning to nothing gives people the permission to just exist and go with the flow. Until nothingness is embraced there will always be friction in life
When a yogi is in practice as when you are in yours, they are climbing up these concepts and trying to reach that nothingness. It is the experience of surrender that is necessary for full participation. So, when you sink into a half-pigeon and embrace the intensity by channeling nothingness, a yogi believes that to be the highest principle. That surrender is God, the linchpin of a physical and mental reality.
5. Yoga has Prophecies About The Future
Yogis loved to observe patterns. They measured the cycles of the stars as much as they studied the cycles of their own thought, their own biology, and their own culture. Regarding culture, the believed that it was governed by the cycles of the stars and the disposition of those 11 elemental and universal forces. In the same way that we can be in a certain mood, reality itself also passes through its “moods.”
The Yogis believed the universe has four “moods” and each one ranges in time anywhere from around two-million to 500,000 years. Our current mood as a universe is the last of the four, the shortest, and the darkest. As usual, the prophecy is about the end-times. But in Yogic thought, the end leads to new beginnings. This chapter is defined by ignorance and arrogance. It’s a time when humanity as a whole looks away from harmony and towards selfishness and destruction. Hmmm, I wonder why Yoga is so popular now?
The basic message of the philosophy, real or not, is to not be ignorant or arrogant. Work selflessly and cooperate with others. I think that message can be universally embraced as good. Yogis believed the “moods” of the universe were less important than their own inner nature because they could control their inner nature if they chose, whereas controlling nature itself was obviously out of the question. Living up to the mission of self-control, harmony, and selflessness, they practiced postures, breathing, and meditation while studying their physics of spirit to become forces of good in a time of perceived darkness.
Like Gandhi knew, to change the world we must change ourselves. The yogis who came before him and made a culture that influenced the Indian rebel practiced to become better people despite the era of darkness they believed they were living through.
Yoga in the sense is an act of rebellion but revolution is fundamentally about re-balancing. Each yoga class, every chanted Om every breath in yoga is about keeping the spirits of harmony and goodness strong in this living-mental universe by controlling our own enthusiasm and presence because even the universe is destined to lose its light sometimes.
In closing, life is what we think it is and for that reason, yoga is as much about powerful ideas as it is about exercise and health. Add on that humans are not purely logical, most of us are still governed by superstition and illogica-creative-imaginary beliefs because despite their lack of evidence or substance these beliefs embolden our character and strengthen our ethos. Yogic ideas have a particular vastness to them and because of that have become temples with tall jutting towers in the landscape of my thoughts. What I feel when I remember to appreciate these towering notions is what validates them in my work.
