How Old is That Pose?

I recently finished reading Mark Singleton's brilliant book Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice. 

It is a well argued, balanced view of the modern history of Yoga Asana and presents challenges on alot of what i've been taught in the past that really made me think. Much like a good recipe book i think this might be something i will be dipping in and out of for some time to come. What i found most appealing is the author does not impose a conclusion as to the rightness or wrongness of how you, I or others interpret the recipe for Yoga. The feeling i was left with is that Yoga (as commonly taught) has as much to do with ancient Indian spirituality and practice as my dad's dahl has to do with Indian traditional food - I still love it though - and loving it with the discipline of knowledge that cultures blend, invent and coalesce traditions is a welcome head clearing freedom! Well worth a read if you want to know more about why we practise the way we do, but if you don't here is an article by Mark Singleton from Yoga Journal that will give you a little taster...

Yoga's Greater Truth

A scholar embarks on a quest to trace the roots of his yoga practice back to their source. What he finds confounds and unsettles him, and, ultimately, provides him with a glimpse of yoga's greater truth.

By Mark Singleton.

The pale winter sunlight shone from the high windows of the Cambridge University library onto a dark leather book cover. In the hall full of silent scholars, I opened it and leafed through picture after picture of men and women in familiar postures. Here was Warrior Pose; there was Downward Dog. On this page the standing balance Utthita Padangusthasana; on the next pages Headstand, Handstand, Supta Virasana, and more—everything you might expect to find in a manual of yoga asana. But this was no yoga book. It was a text describing an early 20th-century Danish system of dynamic exercise called Primitive Gymnastics. Standing in front of my yoga students that evening, I reflected on my discovery. What did it mean that many of the poses I was teaching were identical to those developed by a Scandinavian gymnastics teacher less than a century ago? This gymnast had not been to India and had never received any teaching in asana. And yet his system, with its five-count format, its abdominal "locks," and its dynamic jumps in and out of those oh-so-familiar postures, looked uncannily like the vinyasa yoga system I knew so well.

Time passed, and my curiosity nagged at me, leading me to do further research. I learned that the Danish system was an offshoot of a 19th-century Scandinavian gymnastics tradition that had revolutionized the way Europeans exercised. Systems based on the Scandinavian model sprang up throughout Europe and became the basis for physical training in armies, navies, and many schools. These systems also found their way to India. In the 1920s, according to a survey taken by the Indian YMCA, Primitive Gymnastics was one of the most popular forms of exercise in the whole subcontinent, second only to the original Swedish gymnastics developed by P.H. Ling. That's when I became seriously confused...

to read more click here