Return To Tradition

More popular than ever before, Yoga is said to relieve the stresses and strains of modern day living. Millions of people worldwide have taken up yoga, some of them inspired by the many celebrities who have taken to the mat as part of their daily exercise regimes.

As yoga has become more popular, it has received much more media attention, spawning hundreds of articles on the different approaches to yoga and how it should be practised. Downward dog pose, ayurveda and sun salutation have become household words, if not household practice. And commerce has kept pace: ever since Madonna declared that her super-toned physique was in part, due to regular yoga practice, women's magazines the world over have published articles describing the extraordinary slimming and toning benefits of the ancient discipline.

According to established practitioners and spiritual traditionalists, however, there have been some quite significant adverse effects of yoga's emergence into popular culture. In general terms, this has revolved around the 'watering down' of yoga's traditional ideals, such as personal enlightenment, cosmic conception and higher consciousness through meditation and practice focused on spiritual realisation. Today, many classes, yoga DVD's and media have drawn attention away from these conventional forms to a 'man-made' discipline aimed at satisfying the needs of Western practitioners: thus, the emphasis is on physical exercise, postures and poses for toning, slimming and weight loss.

Now, a movement is afoot to return yoga to its more traditional roots: to replace sweating with meditation, hip-hop with silence. To replace Madonna as the face of yoga with people more like Patañjali, the man who standardised the ancient philosophical texts around 800 years. Dr. Scott Gerson, a prominent alternative medicine expert and internist in New York who has practised yoga since the 1970s, has called for a return to teaching yoga in its original form - a programme aimed at seeking self-enlightenment by training the mind.

The physical postures, or asanas, most people think of as Yoga are just one segment, and were meant to be part of a year-long path of study including the practice of non-violence, restraint and meditation.

At the heart of all forms of yoga is the assumption that you have not yet tapped into your full potential as a human being. In particular, yoga seeks to put you in touch with your spiritual core - your innermost nature - that which or who you truly are. Over the millennia, yoga has expressed itself in various philosophical and theological systems - none of which can be said to define yoga itself. For yoga is first and foremost a practical spiritual discipline that emphasises personal experimentation and verification. In other words, direct personal experience or spiritual realisation is considered senior to any theory or conceptual system.