It's easy to understand why John Friend highly recommends the book
Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Yoga "for all sincere students
of yoga." Because, Mark Singleton's thesis is a well researched expose
of how modern hatha yoga, or "posture practice," as he terms it, has
changed within and after the practice left India.
But the book is
mainly about how yoga transformed in India itself in the last 150 years.
How yoga's main, modern proponents-T. Krishnamacharya and his students,
K. Patttabhi Jois and B. K. S. Iyengar-mixed their homegrown hatha yoga
practices with European gymnastics.
This was how many Indian
yogis coped with modernity: Rather than remaining in the caves of the
Himalayas, they moved to the city and embraced the oncoming European
cultural trends. They especially embraced its more "esoteric forms of
gymnastics," including the influential Swedish techniques of Ling
(1766-1839).
Singleton uses the word yoga as a homonym to explain
the main goal of his thesis. That is, he emphasizes that the word yoga
has multiple meanings, depending on who uses the term.
This
emphasis is in itself a worthy enterprise for students of everything
yoga; to comprehend and accept that your yoga may not be the same kind
of yoga as my yoga. Simply, that there are many paths of yoga.
In
that regard, John Friend is absolutely right: this is by far the most
comprehensive study of the culture and history of the influential yoga
lineage that runs from T. Krishnamacharya's humid and hot palace studio
in Mysore to Bikram's artificially heated studio in Hollywood.
Singleton's
study on "postural yoga" makes up the bulk of the book. But he also
devotes some pages to outline the history of "traditional" yoga, from
Patanjali to the Shaiva Tantrics who, based on much earlier yoga
traditions, compiled the hatha yoga tradition in the middle ages and
penned the famous yoga text books the Hatha Yoga Pradipika and the
Geranda Samhita.
It is while doing these examinations that
Singleton gets into water much hotter than a Bikram sweat. Thus I
hesitate in giving Singleton a straight A for his otherwise excellent
dissertation.
Singleton claims his project is solely the study of
modern posture yoga. If he had stuck to that project alone, his book
would have been great and received only accolades. But unfortunately, he
commits the same blunder so many modern hatha yogis do.
All yoga
styles are fine, these hatha yogis say. All homonyms are equally good
and valid, they claim. Except that homonym, which the cultural
relativist hatha yogis perceive as an arrogant version of yoga. Why?
Because its adherents, the traditionalists, claim it is a deeper, more
spiritual and traditional from of yoga.
This kind of ranking, thinks Singleton, is counterproductive and a waste of time.
Georg
Feuerstein disagrees. Undoubtedly the most prolific and well-respected
yoga scholar outside India today, he is one of those traditionalists who
holds yoga to be an integral practice-a body, mind, spirit practice. So
how does Feuerstein's integral yoga homonym differ from the
non-integral modern posture yoga homonym presented to us by Singleton?
Simply
put, Feuerstein's remarkable writings on yoga have focused on the
holistic practice of yoga. On the whole shebang of practices that
traditional yoga developed over the past 5000 plus years: asanas,
pranayama (breathing exercises), chakra (subtle energy centers),
kundalini (spiritual energy), bandhas (advanced body locks), mantras,
mudras (hand gestures), etc.
Hence, while posture yoga primarily
focuses on the physical body, on doing postures, integral yoga includes
both the physical and the subtle body and involves a whole plethora of
physical, mental and spiritual practices hardly ever practiced in any of
today's modern yoga studios.
I would not have bothered to bring
all this up had it not been for the fact that Singleton mentioned
Feuerstein in a critical light in his book's "Concluding Reflections."
In other words, it is strategically important for Singleton to critique
Feuerstein's interpretation of yoga, a form of yoga which happens to
pretty much coincide with my own.
Singleton writes: "For some,
such as best-selling yoga scholar Georg Feuerstein, the modern
fascination with postural yoga can only be a perversion of the authentic
yoga of tradition." Then Singleton quotes Feuerstein, who writes that
when yoga reached Western shores it "was gradually stripped of its
spiritual orientation and remodeled into fitness training."
Singleton
then correctly points out that yoga had already started this fitness
change in India. He also correctly points out that fitness yoga is not
apposed to any "spiritual" enterprise of yoga. But that is not exactly
Feuerstein's point: he simply points out how the physical exercise part
of modern yoga lacks a deep "spiritual orientation." And that is a
crucial difference.
Then Singleton exclaims that Feuerstein's
assertions misses the "deeply spiritual orientation of some modern
bodybuilding and women's fitness training in the harmonial gymnastics
tradition."
While I think I am quite clear about what Feuerstein
means by "deeply spiritual," I am still not sure what Singleton means by
it from just reading Yoga Body. And that makes an intelligent
comparison difficult. Hence why did Singleton bring this up in his
concluding arguments in a book devoted to physical postures? Surely to
make a point.
Since he did make a point about it, I would like to respond.
According
to Feuerstein, the goal of yoga is enlightenment (Samadhi), not
physical fitness, not even spiritual physical fitness. Not a better,
slimmer physique, but a better chance at spiritual liberation.
For
him, yoga is primarily a spiritual practice involving deep postures,
deep study and deep meditation. Even though postures are an integral
part of traditional yoga, enlightenment is possible even without the
practice of posture yoga, indisputably proven by such sages as Ananda
Mai Ma, Ramana Maharishi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, and others.
The
broader question about the goal of yoga, from the point of view of
traditional yoga is this: is it possible to attain enlightenment through
the practice of fitness yoga alone? The answer: Not very easy. Not even
likely. Not even by practicing the kind of fitness yoga Singleton
claims is "spiritual."
According to integral yoga, the body is the
first and outer layer of the mind. Enlightenment, however, takes place
in and beyond the fifth and innermost layer of the subtle body, or
kosa,
not in the physical body. Hence, from this particular perspective of
yoga, fitness yoga has certain limits, simply because it cannot alone
deliver the desired results.
Similarily, Feuerstein and all us
other traditionalists (oh, those darn labels!) are simply saying that if
your goal is enlightenment, then fitness yoga probably won't do the
trick. You can stand on your head and do power yoga from dawn to
midnight, but you still won't be enlightened.
Hence, they designed
sitting yoga postures (padmasana, siddhasana, viirasana, etc) for such
particular purposes. Indeed, they spent more time sitting still in
meditation over moving about doing postures, as it was the sitting
practices which induced the desired trance states of enlightenment, or
Samadhi.
In other words, you can be enlightened without ever
practicing the varied hatha postures, but you probably won't get
enlightened by just practicing these postures alone, no matter how
"spiritual" those postures are.
These are the kinds of layered
insights and perspectives I sorely missed while reading Yoga Body. Hence
his criticism of Feuerstein seems rather shallow and kneejerk.
Singleton's
sole focus on describing the physical practice and history of modern
yoga is comprehensive, probably quite accurate, and rather impressive,
but his insistence that there are "deeply spiritual" aspects of modern
gymnastics and posture yoga misses an important point about yoga.
Namely, that our bodies are only as spiritual as we are, from that space
in our hearts, deep within and beyond the body.
Yoga Body thus
misses a crucial point many of us have the right to claim, and without
having to be criticized for being arrogant or mean-minded: that yoga is
primarily a holistic practice, in which the physical body is seen as the
first layer of a series of ascending and all-embracing layers of
being-from body to mind to spirit. And that ultimately, even the body is
the dwelling place of Spirit. In sum, the body is the sacred temple of
Spirit.
And where does this yoga perspective hail from? According
to Feuerstein, "It underlies the entire Tantric tradition, notably the
schools of hatha yoga, which are an offshoot of Tantrism."
In
Tantra it is clearly understood that the human being is a three-tiered
being-physical, mental and spiritual. Hence, the Tantrics very
skillfully and carefully developed practices for all three levels of
being.
From this ancient perspective, it is very gratifying to see
how the more spiritual, all-embracing tantric and yogic practices such
as hatha yoga, mantra meditation, breathing exercises, ayurveda, kirtan,
and scriptural study are increasingly becoming integral features of
many modern yoga studios.
So, to answer the question in the title
of this article. Can we have both a limber physique and a sacred spirit
while practicing yoga? Yes, of course we can. Yoga is not either/or.
Yoga is yes/and. The more holistic our yoga practice becomes-that is,
the more spiritual practice is added to our posture practice-the more
these two seemingly opposite poles-the body and the spirit-will blend
and unify. Unity was, after all, the goal of ancient Tantra.
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