Yoga

About Yoga

Yoga is not one thing, and it never was. The word comes from a root meaning to yoke or to join, and for most of its history it named a family of disciplines aimed at doing something specific with attention — binding it, steadying it, and eventually seeing what remains when the mind stops moving. The postures came late. Patañjali, compiling the classical system somewhere around the turn of the era, gives posture three words and moves on. The physical tradition most people now recognise grew out of haṭha yoga from roughly the eleventh century, and the sequences taught in studios today were substantially shaped in twentieth-century India. All of these are yoga. What they share is the claim that the mind can be trained, that the body and breath are levers for training it, and that the training changes what you take yourself to be. This guide lays out the map — four classical paths, eight limbs, and the practical routes in — so you can find where you actually are.