A Mini-history of Yoga as Exercise, Part 1
We glossed over Yoga as exercise last week, nodding to how it can cultivate mobility, strength, cardio, and/or subtle energy, all varying depending on what you're doing. This calls for a brief history of Yoga āsana (postures & movement) practice. I'll talk us through some highlights of Yoga history that's now pretty well known: the origin of movement practice in the medieval Haṭha tradition, the development of āsana as exercise in the colonial period, the explosion of āsana in the mid-20th century and modern transmission to the West in the Northern (Śivānanda) and Southern (Krishnamacharya), and the chaos of postmodern Yoga in the US since hyperpopularity in the 21st.
Underlying questions I'm holding are around how we might think about Yoga now if we disentangle it from the Orientalist assumptions and inaccurate health claims that characterized it in the modern period, and bring it into a more historically-coherent and spiritually-grounded consideration.
