Indian Summer Festival showcases history of yoga

CBC

Updated July 14, 2018 at 5:00 p.m.

Yoga culture is alive and well in B.C.'s Lower Mainland as a popular activity and practice for many. But the way it is practiced today can be quite different from how it was originally practiced thousands of years ago.

That difference is the subject of a recent lecture at Vancouver's Indian Summer Festival titled Yoga: To Mortify or Cultivate the Body?

"When it first gets written down, it's all about meditation," said James Mallinson, a yoga scholar at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

Mallinson has been studying Indian culture and languages since he was 17, and has devoted much of his career to understanding the ancient yoga practice.

Learning about the practice's origins are difficult, he said, largely due to India's hot, humid climate. Many of the written records of yoga have deteriorated over time, but we do have many external accounts written by those who visited the country.

'Strange postures'

One of the earliest recordings of physical yoga was made by scribes working with Alexander the Great when he attempted to invade India in approximately 300 BC, said Mallinson.

"These holy men came up to meet him and they would adopt strange postures in the hot sun."

From these early writings, Mallinson learned that ancient yoga was typically a practice for men, and it was probably a form of meditative penance.

"They believed they were purifying themselves, and as a result [of the postures] would gain great power," said Mallinson.

Fringe practice

It wasn't until roughly AD 1000 that yoga began to shift into a practice of body positivity, he said. Around this time, the writings begin to suggest esoteric methods of manipulating body energies.

Even then, yoga remained a fringe practice in India until about AD 500, said Mallinson. At that time, the practice became more mainstream and people began teaching specific postures.

"It gets mixed up ... with the traditional system of health in India and then it snowballs into this huge holistic, healthy thing."

Mallinson said yoga was traditionally taught one-on-one and the idea of a yoga class is one of the newest innovations to come along in the practice's history.

With files from On the Coast