A Real History of Yoga

300 million people around the world are doing yoga. But the majority aren’t doing yoga — they’re doing market yoga. Do you know if you are? To understand what yoga really is, we need a real history of it.

Why a “Real” History?

Namaste. I salute you, divine soul, for your interest in this sacred study. You are truly great and noble just for opening this video. We’re here to talk about the real history of yoga. It’s important because this will empower us to retrieve the miraculous healing power of the yoga of the rishis. But wait — a real history? Hasn’t the history of yoga already been written? There are shelves of books, documentaries, entire university departments.

There are. And almost every one of them rests on a single, silent assumption: that we — the modern West — stand at the apex of human evolution, looking down through the centuries at a simpler people who could not have understood the universe with the sophistication we do now. Almost everything the West thinks it knows about yoga comes from scholars looking at texts. And when the scholar picks up India’s most sacred texts, he handles them the way an archaeologist handles bones — artifacts to be dated, sorted, and explained away.

When those words of sages declare where yoga comes from, what it is for, and what it can do — they call it mythology. When the tradition records its own history — they call it legend, not evidence. This is really a colonial mindset that can’t comprehend the immense sophistication of yoga. You can see that mind advertising itself. This is a soap advertisement from 1899 — selling cleanliness as the white man’s burden, civilisation in a bar of soap.

That is the mind that first catalogued yoga, and it is the mind that wrote most of the histories we inherited. Just think: every three years, the kumbha mela sees millions of yogis appearing out of nowhere — they have no books, no websites, and are not teaching anything publicly. This means there are literally billions of luminary sages who have contributed to the universal knowledge known as yoga since before written history.

So, for all these books the West confidently writes about yoga’s history, the truth is that we really have no idea about the reality of living yoga on our planet. That’s why in this video, we are going to do what almost no history of yoga has dared to do: we are going to let yoga tell its own history — the way it has been preserved, guarded, and handed down through the lineages for countless thousands of years. You don’t have to believe every word; skepticism is a sign of intelligence.

I only ask that you hear it whole — and then decide for yourself. Because as you’ll see, the assumption that we understand the rishis better than they understood themselves is precisely how yoga’s healing power was lost. Now — let’s journey through the real history of yoga.

Part One · The Paradox

What Is Yoga?

Let’s start by asking the very basic question: what is yoga? If you ask a four-year-old watching a modern yoga class, you get that it looks like breathing followed by slow karate. Is yoga a practice of flexibility? If it’s just flexibility, clearly this rhythmic gymnast would be a yoga master. Is yoga a performance? No — that’s the domain of dance, which has its own tradition with thousands of years of its own development.

Is the four-year-old right that yoga is a form of self-defense? Despite yoga appearing in video games as a martial art, the thought of someone actually defending themselves with yoga āsana is simply dangerous. So what are all these hundreds of millions of people doing? And why? This is what I call the paradox of market yoga. It can’t answer the most basic questions about itself: what it is, what we’re aiming to achieve through its practice, or what it would even mean to be a yoga master.

Here’s what’s interesting: more than 90% of people come to yoga for flexibility, stress relief, and physical fitness. But two-thirds of students and more than four-fifths of teachers change their primary reason for practicing — and most change to practicing for its spirituality. So there is a huge number of Westerners now pursuing yoga for its spiritual knowledge. But aside from thousands of advertisements conveying yoga in a vague sense of spirituality — what does yoga actually teach?

With so many teachers doing their own study, people all over the world are hearing little sound bites of yoga philosophy while they practice a lot of different poses. But this is like a tease, right? Because you know yoga is a spiritual practice with deep ancient roots — but how much are you really connecting with those roots just by doing poses? Millions of people are taking workshops and yoga teacher trainings to find out more.

But the majority of these trainings are focused on āsana and the physical practice — because that’s what teachers need to know in order to market their classes and make a living. And there’s been so much focus on yoga āsana in this commercialization that it’s ended up really distorting the full vision of what yoga is and what it’s designed to do. In fact, āsana is only the smallest fraction of what yoga actually is, and to understand yoga we need to understand the culture from which it comes.

The Ancient Science

Because this culture is so ancient that it’s actually prehistoric. It existed for thousands of years before the written word, and it is a culture filled with incredible science. What do I mean by science? Almost all of our revolutionary discoveries in science were already described in the Vedas. Copernicus’s revolution — that the sun is at the center of our planetary system — can be found 3,000 years earlier in the Rig Veda, which is literally humanity’s oldest text. Newton’s revolutionary discovery of gravity, which formed the first basis of our physics, was already written down in India at least 1,200 years earlier.

Even John Dalton’s discovery of atomic theory is no real discovery — it was already written down in the ancient texts of India some 2,400 years earlier. And you would probably be stunned to know that some of these scriptures even described the atomic weight of gold as 79, and mention the wave nature of light. So much science is there. In fact, some now argue modern science is less a discovery than a rediscovery of the Vedas.

India had centres of learning drawing students from across the known world — Takshasilā by the sixth century BC, and later Nālandā, with thousands of students in residence. And Vedic science includes every subject you can imagine — mathematics, cosmology, astrology, medicine, chemistry, yoga, archery, metallurgy, diplomacy, self-defense. But did you know that out of all those Vedic sciences, one thing you cannot find any mention of is a workout?

That’s right — working out is simply not an ancient concept. It’s a modern invention, born as a response to people who spend all day at desk jobs and don’t get physical movement in their lives, so they need to go to a gym and move their bodies just for exercise. But the yogis want to spend all their time in meditation — that’s their work. They too needed to care for their bodies, so they discovered the most fantastically efficient way to do it.

And that is what yoga āsana, fundamentally, is for. The rishis practiced yoga āsana, and after mastery, the body was free from disease and stable. They could focus on meditation, no problem. Why were they meditating? What goal are even children in search of accomplishing? What is this wild culture with such sophisticated understanding of the universe about? Self-Realization is not a concept that’s easily understood. Because if you really understand what it means, it will change everything about your life.

And yogis are people who understand that Self-Realization is not only more valuable than gold — it’s truly the only thing worth striving for in this human incarnation. Now remember: yoga was never used in ancient times as a workout. But today yoga is almost exclusively marketed as a workout. And while yoga still delivers great health benefits when used this way, I’m here to tell you that yoga’s miraculous healing power can only be attained by observing the principles that make yoga a science of Self-Realization — because healing comes through progressing toward this ultimate goal.

The West has taken yoga and applied its ideas of modern science to it, thinking it’s making it better. But is it an improvement or just a misunderstanding? Because we haven’t yet asked the very hard questions about yoga. Like: how was this fifteen-year-old boy seen sitting in one place without moving, eating, or sleeping for ten months? And why was he doing this? Or why did this fourteen-year-old boy start meditating an average of 20 hours a day for twelve years?

What compels someone to perform such extraordinary austerities? Why are they meditating so intensely? Because they really understand what Self-Realization means — and its value. To understand what’s been lost in the translation of yoga, we first have to understand the immensity of what existed.

Part Two · The History

Where Does Yoga Come From?

Where does yoga originate? Who created yoga? Yoga actually comes from the Divine — it is a gift given out of compassion for our liberation. This is Mount Kailash, the sacred abode of the Divine Eternal Father and Mother, who are always inseparable and are contained in Om. If you like, you can place your hands in namaste and salute this sacred mountain where yoga was first given. Divine Mother is the shakti — the energy which gives life to everything and empowers the Gods to perform their functions of creation, preservation, and dissolution.

Divine Mother created the illusion, māyā — the great mystery. And so only Divine Mother knows the secret way out of the illusion, which is yoga. This is important to know because no human created yoga; it comes directly from Mother Nature. The supreme Goddess and compassionate Mother taught yoga naturally to Her husband, Lord Shiva Shankar Bhagavan. The Eternal Father took this gift and practiced it intensely. How many trillions of years has Lord Shiva been practicing meditation?

We cannot imagine. In Lord Shiva’s heart always dwells Lord Vishnu, the Sustainer of the Universe. And so naturally, Lord Shiva taught yoga to Lord Vishnu. And Lord Vishnu is the Father of Lord Brahma, the Creator of the universe. Lord Brahma sits on a lotus flower watching His creation — a lotus born from the navel of Lord Vishnu. And so naturally, Lord Vishnu taught the science of yoga to His son, Lord Brahma. Lord Brahma has ten sons and one daughter, born from His own mind.

Seven of these sons are the seven holy rishis who are the architects of creation. And of these seven, Lord Brahma’s son Vashishta Brahmarshi was born fully enlightened, and was never going to come down from that perch of perfection. Seeing his perfectly detached son, in order to teach Sage Vashishta compassion for humanity, his father the Creator gave him a firsthand experience of maya, the great illusion. Wailing in tears, Vashishta begged for release. His father finally took back the illusion, explaining: “See, my son, how humanity suffers in the illusion. What you experienced is only a small fraction of what they are going through.”

Touched to his core, the sage asked the Creator to teach him yoga, so that he might teach it to humanity and help them achieve liberation. Sage Vashishta is such a great rishi that he was even the guru of Sri Rama — yes, he was the guru of God Himself. Vashishta Brahmarshi also taught yoga to his son, Shakti Maharshi, who taught it to his son, Pārāśāra Muni, who taught it to his son, Veda Vyāsa Muni.

He is known as ‘Veda Vyāsa’ because this great sage was the first to compile, arrange, and write down all of the Vedas and their hundreds of thousands of verses — over 5,000 years ago. And Vyāsa Guru had a brilliantly pure son: Śuka Maharshi — who was so pure that when he was born, he took one look at the world, saw there’s nothing here of value, and immediately closed his eyes in meditation. Such a sage! Shukadev received the teachings of yoga from his father and taught yoga to the people.

But it was only passed down in inner circles. Everyone knew about yogis — but what they did was never written down. You only learned if you became a yogi yourself. So we really have no idea how old this practice is — it existed like this long before written history. And this is a really, really important point to keep in mind: we have no idea how much of this legacy exists that has never been written down. The full knowledge of yoga is a guarded secret.

In other words, yoga is what’s known as an esoteric science. What we call ‘science’ is a system of thought that is exoteric — it’s visible. You might even say it’s the most exoteric, in that it aims to objectify the universe through public consensus. We take peer review and replicability as the standards for knowledge acceptance. Everything is written, published, and categorized. But the science of yoga is esoteric — hidden or invisible.

It’s passed directly from the guru to the disciple. And it requires being a disciple, not just a scholar — because yoga reveals hidden knowledge that takes training to receive, because it will so radically transform the way you see the world that only special people can receive it. It’s important to understand that hidden is not the opposite of scientific. Everything written on yoga is intentionally incomplete, and much of the tradition is not written down at all.

This is why the majority of Western scholars of yoga really have no idea what they’re talking about, because you have to have connection to a lineage in order to understand yoga and its practices.

Yoga Comes to the West

So let’s fast-forward through unknown, countless millennia of this hidden yoga — to the first yogi who brought it to the West. Swami Vivekānanda. This great yogi has been described as a rod of gold — completely pure, a shining example of yoga. His guru is one of the greatest saints in India’s modern history: Śri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa — this great devotee of God was like the philosopher’s stone, in that anyone touched by his teachings became pure gold.

Swami Vivekānanda came to America at the request of this great guru. Everyone must always remember this: yoga is in the West because of the will and the word of this great saint — who, together with Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi, is considered one of the greatest yogis of the 19th century. When Swami Vivekānanda came to the United States, he was invited to speak at the first World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, 1893. He was given only a few minutes — but his riveting speech changed the world forever, extending an invitation to members of all faiths to recognize their inherent unity of spirit, to see the East and West as family united in the same human pursuit of Truth.

He received a standing ovation. 1893 was also the birth year of another great yogi — one who was drawn to yoga from a very young age, and who would receive initiation into monkhood as Yogānanda Paramahamsa, sparking a revolution of yoga consciousness through his book Autobiography of a Yogi — which gave the world its first extraordinary glimpse into the hidden world of the yogis, inspiring many Westerners to study yoga.

And then came more gurus: Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who established the first Vedic University in the West, in Fairfield, Iowa. He brought the Vedas to the West in their subtle form. Sri Swami Satchidananda came to the West at the request of his great guru Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh, and brought yoga to the hippy movement when he spoke at the legendary Woodstock music festival in 1969. Swami Sivananda’s disciples were responsible for the first ever global yoga teacher trainings.

In the 70s BKS Iyengar came and single-handedly developed all of our yoga props to help us tight Westerners, and never patented a single one. Swami Rama of the Himalayas came West and helped pioneer biofeedback when he stopped his heart under clinical observation. Yoga was growing and starting to come into our homes through some incredible TV shows on PBS — but it was still considered something of an off-beat practice, something hippies do — or worse, feared as a cult activity.

But then everything changed when the Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga developed by Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya came to the West. Sri Krishnamacharya is called here the ‘Father of Modern Yoga’. But I really don’t think he would like this name, because in reality there’s no such thing as ‘modern yoga’ — yoga is eternal. What there was, was the invention of exercise yoga. And Sri Krishnamacharya, a true yogi, was more like its stepfather.

But the high-powered, athletic appearance of Ashtanga Vinyasa appealed to celebrities who helped popularize it. Supermodels doing yoga suddenly made it appealing to the mainstream. Yoga studios began to proliferate in cities all across America. But back in the late 90s, there was still this understanding that if it wasn’t connected to a lineage, it shouldn’t be called yoga. All studio yoga was identified by the lineage it came from.

So what happened in those two short decades? How did we lose the sacred connection from the source of yoga, down through the ages to the rishis, who faithfully passed it to humanity? And how did we lose all sight of the importance of lineage?

The Birth of Market Yoga

In May of 1997, about two dozen students of different lineages got together and formed Yoga Alliance — an organization aiming to create universal standards for yoga teacher trainings. They formally completed this process in August of 1999, and the first yoga schools were registered. But wait — registered? Weren’t they supposed to certify teachers? Yoga Alliance wanted to avoid offending anyone who called what they did ‘yoga,’ and to be as inclusive as possible.

But how do you do this without taking on liability in case someone you certify teaches something unsafe? Their solution was to have registered yoga schools — and avoid certifying teachers and schools altogether. Instead, create a registered list of teachers and schools that meet certain criteria. This successfully eliminates liability from their accreditation program and opens the doors of inclusivity. So what criteria do you need to meet to become a registered teacher or school?

Well, it’s genuinely complicated — because you have Sivananda yoga, Iyengar yoga, Ashtanga, Kripalu, Kundalini, Himalayan, and literally millions of potential lineages that still exist undiscovered in India. Then you have Western teachers with their own brands and Sanskrit names, insisting on creating their own thing. So how did Yoga Alliance maintain inclusivity? They decided it best to avoid listing any specific material as required knowledge — instead, only requiring blanket ‘hours’ accumulated in different subjects.

We need to pause here. Because this represents the major turning point for yoga. This was the critical moment that yoga was separated from lineage — and it is historically the moment that the soul of yoga as a universal science of consciousness, together with its miraculous healing power, was lost. Yoga Alliance essentially gave permission for people to call anything they do ‘yoga’ without any connection to lineage — and as a result, market yoga was born.

An entirely new and modern yoga culture was born, and market yoga has genuinely benefited our consumer culture in many good ways. It helped give rise to the huge global organic and natural food movement. You can almost always find a healthy eatery near your local yoga studio. Even the world of body building has ditched chemical supplements for whole foods. And beautiful communities of support have been created all over the world — helping greatly with the sense of isolation so many people feel in our modern world.

Who can express the greatness of this? And who can deny how much fun everyone is having? Fun is great, we need fun, but we need to ask: is it safe? Unfortunately, not every change that’s come with market yoga has been good. Researchers found that injuries in yoga more than doubled with the rise of market yoga. For seniors aged 65 and older, the rate of injury rose by eight times. When I started yoga in the mid-90s, nobody I knew had ever even heard of someone getting injured through yoga.

In fact, people were coming to yoga in order to heal their injuries from other sports. Today, 1 in 10 Americans use yoga as part of a complementary and alternative medicine program — but there is no distinction in these programs between lineage-based yoga and market invention. And here’s a trigger warning, because we’re now about to go into the ugly world of social media and its connection to market yoga. Researchers in Canada found an 80% increase in yoga related injuries over a seven year period. Why?

Well, there’s been an effect on our consciousness of seeing all these sexy models in advanced poses on yoga magazines. Little girls growing up with yoga Barbies. And the advent of social media has opened up a whole new door for the expression of vanity.

In the world of social competition, young women especially are risking life and limb in the pursuit of sexy selfies. And this is what the researchers in Canada found: that people are showcasing themselves on social media based on the sex appeal of difficult yoga poses in tight clothing and risky environments.

So there’s good, bad, and ugly in the world of market yoga, and this has had real consequences. Many people today associate yoga with vanity and self-indulgence, and want nothing to do with it as a result.

Meanwhile, throughout all of this, the yogis in India are simply praying for us. Praying for our world. And faithfully continuing their practices in silence, without ever commenting on any of this.

The Invasive Species

Now, I’m not trying to say that market yoga is a villain. We just need an analogy to really appreciate what has happened, and I finally found the perfect analogy from the natural world — which isn’t surprising, because yoga itself comes from nature. A native species is one that developed in its environment over millions of years of natural evolution. An invasive species, by contrast, was introduced to an environment by humans.

Globally, the two greatest destroyers of biodiversity are habitat destruction and invasion by non-native species. Market yoga moved into our consumer environment and took over — again, in only two short decades. An estimated 300 million people are now engaging in market yoga — that’s 4% of the world population, or 1 in 25 people on the planet. Which is extraordinary. Fully 1 in 10 people in the United States are doing yoga.

Globally, market yoga is worth an estimated $180 billion dollars. Now, many botanists view invasive plants as nature’s response to illness — that invasive species are actually bringing medicine to ravaged environments. For example, Japanese Knotweed dominates the northeastern shoreline of the US — a place where Lyme disease is endemic — and it happens to be very effective at treating Lyme as part of certain herbal protocols.

Market yoga, likewise, has certainly provided some necessary and positive medicine to our consumer culture. But is it causing the native species of yoga to disappear? This is what most people think the native yogis looked like. These yogis belong to the Nath lineage, a tantric tradition that believes the ultimate reality can only be expressed through silence. But most people don’t know that these people also are yogis.

The Brahmin caste has kept the Vedic knowledge of yoga alive through countless unknown millennia, and Vedic priests are actually the real and largely unknown authorities on yoga — ones we never think or know to ask about in the West — yet they each hold the equivalent of four PhDs with 16 years of Vedic studies. Modern yoga culture has now dominated the globe, with rubber mats and tight petrochemical clothes. Even invading India itself. There are presently 540 Yoga Alliance registered yoga schools in yoga’s native land.

Now, many people think colonization is the biggest issue here. I want to say that I’m sensitive to the real pains of British colonization still felt in India, and honor that pain. And I have to tell you that the two are not separate. The colonization of yoga’s own story began where every colonization begins — in a schoolroom, teaching children that what their own people knew was not knowledge.

And what’s at stake here isn’t politics. This is so important because we are in danger of losing all sight of yoga’s miraculous healing power.

Why We Need This Now

And we really need that healing power right now. In a single generation, our world has seen an obscene rise in chronic disease. In less than thirty years, diabetes has roughly quadrupled. Autism diagnoses have risen many times over. Autoimmune disease, asthma, sleep apnoea, osteoarthritis — all sharply up in a single generation. At least forty chronic diseases have more than doubled in a single generation. Americans are suffering from an average of 2.1 chronic diseases per person — from germless disease.

The annual economic impact — including medical costs, lost income, and medical research — is estimated at just over $2.5 trillion. We know that almost 2 out of 5 Americans will receive a cancer diagnosis at some point in their lives. And almost 1 in 10 presently have an active cancer diagnosis. Why are we suffering this insane increase in illness? Maybe it’s the air we’re breathing. Or our water, polluted by factory waste. And from our mountains being decapitated. Or the billions of gallons of chemicals sprayed annually on our food.

And with global warming threatening all life on our planet, you have to ask: what is wrong with us, that we have allowed all of these things to happen in the first place? Maybe it’s our lack of shared values from conflicting worldviews. Or our short-sighted pursuit of money. Or our attention consumed in distraction. Or we’re simply too busy competing against each other to stop and look.

Part Three · The Retrieval

The Yogi Is Not Afraid to See

The good news is that yoga has the power to heal all of these root causes of our collective suffering. How? The fundamental problem here is willful ignorance. We try not to become aware of these problems — we seek distractions — because of fear. Fear of facing them. Which itself arises from the pain we’re carrying inside, which cannot bear to look at the truth. We are closing our eyes to this destruction because we are afraid to see.

But a yogi is not afraid to see the truth. Because a yogi is able to see the pain — and to see deeper, all the way to the most beautiful truth: everything is One. This is how a yogi is a healer. Yoga is Union — the reuniting of what was separated. And the beautiful truth the yogi sees is the secret that everything is connected. And if we heal ourselves, we heal our world. Why are the yogis of India just praying for us, when they could be speaking out?

What we don’t understand is that a yogi is considered all-powerful — fully identified with the supreme reality. A yogi is unconquerable. In fact, they are omniscient. And their omniscience turns kings into beggars. Yes, even kings become beggars before a yogi — because their knowledge is supreme, that of Self-Realization. Self-realized masters are omniscient, and they can see the future. In fact, another word for a yogi is a rishi — one who sees.

And remember: yoga came to the West because of the will and the word of Sri Ramakrishna — a true yogi who surely saw all of this development happening. He saw how special this moment is in time — when almost every person on the planet is now saying the word ‘yoga.’ And yoga is a word with a sacred vibration so powerful that just saying it can itself grant realization. And how special it is that fully 1 in 40 people are now studying yoga for its spirituality.

This is a powerful moment for our world — one that is pregnant with the fruits of yoga. Fruits with the promise of elevating humanity to world peace. Yes — this is really possible. Each one of us who does this work of yoga elevates our global consciousness. And the Vedas have declared that Self-Realization is the greatest achievement of life — an achievement that benefits all of creation.

How Lineage Is Restored — The Divine Does Not Leave Us Alone

This quest depends on us successfully retrieving the soul of yoga. So how do we make that vital reconnection to lineage? For those of us who are truth seekers — who want to see our world in this elevated state — there is hope. Even in times of confusion, when there seems to be no guiding light — millions of false experts innocently misleading people, and too many moral scandals dashing our hopes of finding authentic lineage — there is still hope.

Hope that the great sage Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi even prophesied would happen, a prophecy about the grace of the Divine. Because the Divine is infinite mercy and an ocean of compassion. Just as it’s written in the Bhagavad Gītā:

yadā yadā hi dharmasya glānir bhavati bhārata
abhyutthānam adharmasya tadātmānaṁ sṛjāmy aham

This famous verse is the promise of the Divine that “whenever Truth is waning from our world, I manifest Myself to rescue its Light.” In our modern age we have not been left in the darkness.

The embodiment of compassion, Her Holiness Amma Śri Karuṇāmayi, has performed this task of rescuing yoga. We call Sri Karunamayi Amma ‘Her Holiness’ because she accomplished this through a great sacrifice for our world — over 12 years of meditation in the remote forests of Andhra Pradesh, South India. Her Holiness was on a mission: to reconnect humanity with the knowledge of Vedic science — sanātana dharma, the eternal way — and to eliminate poverty from the world through knowledge.

Her Holiness is shining light on all the Vedic sciences. And as for the sacred science of yoga, she has given us some important keys. Keys that allow us to make a clear delineation between yoga and its market cousin. Such as: “The difference between exercise and yoga is that in exercise there is movement. In yoga, there is no movement.” Not even thoughts. Not even mantras. Yogaścittavṛttinirodhaḥ — if you are in mental silence, you are in yoga.

Does this mean all vinyasa flow is not yoga? Not necessarily. Her Holiness has expressed that there are four main paths of yoga. Just as temple dance is a great yoga of devotion that involves movement — belonging to bhakti yoga — so too can movement serve a sacred purpose. In karma yoga, the path of selfless service, movement science is harnessed for the benefit of others in martial arts. But meditation happens in stillness.

And there is incredible science to the practice of āsana that we haven’t even begun to consider — like the psychological and spiritual effects of offering the posture as a gift to the Divine. This is something that has to be experienced. It cannot be expressed in words. Because it is true that exercise shapes the body. But yoga shapes the soul. Because yoga represents a very special and sacred connection, one that holds incredible healing power — a healing that’s connected to yoga’s transformational power, and these powers are ultimately connected to our soul evolution.

Yes, when properly practiced, yoga will heal you and evolve your soul. And there is a key found in every scripture written about yoga, emphasized by every great teacher of yoga āsana: strain is always to be avoided. My dear friend Dr. Dilip Sarkar even defines yoga as the conscious activation of the parasympathetic nervous system. One can measure one’s progress by how peaceful one becomes — because peace is the direct product of this profound relaxation.

So the important question here for you is:

An Invitation

Why do you do yoga? I’m guessing you’re also drawn to yoga’s spirituality — that you’ve learned a great deal about this prehistoric culture and have touched yoga’s transformation power. You’ve made lifestyle changes — maybe in your diet, maybe in your study of yogic texts. And there’s something else calling you. Something you maybe even struggle to put into words. And you’ve sensed the limitations of what’s available on the market.

It’s frustrating, because here you are with this great longing to go deep — but you’re not sure where to look for an authentic source of knowledge that can take you to the next level. I want you to know: you are not alone in that. I’ve packed this video with leads for you. But it’s up to you to pursue it. To discover for yourself that yoga’s miraculous healing power is real. It is connected to a profound truth that hasn’t yet been fully accessed.

And retrieving the soul of yoga — making that vital reconnection to lineage — is the work of our time. If this has sparked something in you, I invite you to go deeper. My book, Yoga is Union — The Yoga of Amma Sri Karunamayi, is one place to start. One hundred percent of the proceeds go to the charitable activities of SMVA Trust, whose goal is to spread peace everywhere. My new book Final Surrender: The Untold Glory of Shavasana is an ideal starting place for those new to yoga, and will help you understand your practice even if you’ve been at it for decades.

I want to see our world home in an elevated state, and know that yoga, properly understood, can achieve this. I invite you to subscribe, and stay with me — because what we’ve covered today is only the beginning. The ocean is very vast and very, very deep.

Yoga has always been an invitation — not to a posture, but to a question. Who am I? Who am I really? The rishis didn’t give us answers; they gifted us a method.

The real history of yoga isn’t behind us. It’s happening now.

With prayers for our world home and all creation.

Om. Svasti prajābhyaḥ paripālayantāṁ nyāyena mārgeṇa mahīṁ mahīśāḥ.
Go-brāhmaṇebhyaḥ śubham astu nityam.
Lokāḥ samastāḥ sukhino bhavantu.
Śāntiḥ, śāntiḥ, śāntiḥ.