As has happened every year since 2015, thousands of people gathered in dozens of countries on June 21 to celebrate the international day of yoga, an event established by the UN to promote the ancient discipline of Indian origin. Today yoga is practiced regularly by hundreds of millions of people around the world, more and more as a form of physical exercise than as a meditative practice, as it was at the beginning: it arrived in Europe and North America especially in the last hundred years. years, where it has continued to grow, evolve and attract more and more followers due to its many benefits.
It was Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi who asked the UN to establish International Yoga Day. Since 2014, the year he was elected, Modi has worked hard to promote yoga as part of Indian history and culture: during the first celebration, on June 21, 2015, he described it as a means to achieve peace and joined thousands of other people for a collective practice on the Rajpaht, the monumental avenue in New Delhi dedicated to the most important ceremonies. On another occasion he said that many countries that previously did not know the Indian language, tradition and culture are now approaching India through yoga.
Modi’s efforts to popularize yoga have been seen by some critics as a broader attempt to promote disciplines related to Hinduism, in line with his government’s policy of making India an increasingly nationalistic country. and very different from the secular state that its founding fathers had wanted. As he observed BBCin any case it is true that yoga is one of the major cultural products of India to have been exported around the world.
Yoga is based on a series of more or less complex postures which are called asana and can be put together in defined sequences flowi.e. creating a flow of movements. There are more dynamic and intense practices, and others in which the aerobic effort is less: without going into too many details, Hatha yoga or Iyengar yoga are more static styles, while Power yoga, Ashtanga and Vinyasa are more dynamic. Manmath Gharote, director of a yoga studio in south-east Mumbai, explains that in any case the goal of the discipline is to make the five aspects of each person’s personality work “in harmony”, namely the physical, the mental and those spiritual, emotional and social.
According to Garote the physical dimension of yoga helps to improve the flexibility of the spine and joints and to strengthen the muscles. The main function of asana but according to him it is to do good for the mind.
Hindu clerics during International Yoga Day in Guwahati, India (AP Photo/ Anupam Nath)
On exactly how and where yoga was born there are different hypotheses. However, it is known that in India it has been practiced for about 5 thousand years and that for most of its history it was reserved for ascetics and religious. Jim Mallinson, a scholar of the history of yoga and a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, explains that it was originally a meditative practice, which involved being “completely still and stable.” Some of the asana and of the sequences that we think of today when we have yoga in mind, such as the dog upside down o greeting to the sunin fact they do not appear in the ancient texts in which the practice was described: they have been introduced more recently, also due to the influence of other disciplines.
Several researchers believe, for example, that the position of the dog upside down would correspond to the ancient one elephant position, which was quite similar and is first mentioned in an eighteenth-century text. Mallinson, on the other hand, notes that sun salutation, an integral part of many practices, only began to be taught in the 1930s. Yoga styles like Ashtanga, Iyengar and Vinyasa include elements found in ancient texts but many parts of them are modern innovations, Mallinson says.
As noted in a item are The Conversation Mark Singleton, another researcher from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, yoga arrived in Western countries and began to evolve from the beginning of the twentieth century, thanks to some factors in particular. Meanwhile, those were years in which the culture of the body and physical exercise was widespread (Also in Italyunder the fascist dictatorship); it was also the period in which photographs were beginning to circulate a lot, which made it possible to make the postures practiced in yoga in India known to the European and North American public through books, magazines and manuals.
At first the asana shown in these photos were teased and were seen as exotic and crude, says Singleton. But then little by little the discipline was reconsidered and began to become popular. It has evolved over time under the influence of exercises from various types of gymnastics and the refinement of breathing practices, relaxation techniques and other forms of meditation.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during International Yoga Day in Dehradun, India in 2018 (AP Photo/ Manish Swarup, File)
It is believed that the first to have imported yoga to Western countries was Swami Vivekananda, a Hindu monk who in the late 19th century contributed to making Hindu religion, culture and disciplines known in the United States. His 1896 book King of Yoga (also translated into Italian) was an immediate success: in the following decades many Indian religious went to Europe and North America to teach yoga.
Even non-Indian and non-Hindu people were interested in it, such as Indra Devi, who was born in the territory of present-day Latvia and was the first woman to be able to study with the guru Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, considered one of the fathers of modern yoga. Devi, whose real name was Eugenie Peterson (Eiženija Pētersone in Latvian), opened the first yoga studio in Hollywood in 1948 and introduced the discipline to numerous actresses and actors, including Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson and Yul Brynner. In the 1960s, both the hippie and hippie movements helped popularize it i Beatleswho in 1968 spent a period in the foothills of the Himalayas with the yoga master Maharishi Mahesh, whom they had met the year before during a seminar in Wales.
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Globally yoga is believed to be practiced regularly by about 300 million of people, also thanks to the numerous apps and YouTube channels that allow you to follow lessons remotely, and it is expected that in the coming years the number will increase even more. According to a 2017 study of citizens carried out by the US health authorities, there were more than 30 million people who regularly practiced yoga in the United States: in 2001 there were only 4 million.
One of the reasons why the discipline seems to attract more and more people is that everyone can practice it – albeit with the necessary precautions – because at a basic level it does not require particular skills or many accessories, apart from a mat or little else. Then there is the fact that, as they have pointed out some Educationif you practice it consistently it can help improve the body’s flexibility and strengthen it, but also reduce stress and anxiety.
In Italy yoga it is not considered a sport because the Italian National Olympic Committee (CONI) does not recognize it as such, so for those who teach it there is no real certification recognized by all the experts in the sector. There is however yoga teacher certification from UNIthe Italian association that deals with defining standards for almost all industrial, commercial and service sectors, and there is also an association of yoga teachers, the WELL. Then there is the accreditation of Yoga Alliance, an international NGO that certifies minimum professional standards in teaching techniques and methodologies, as well as principles of yoga, yoga history and philosophy, and professional ethics. There are also people who don’t have these certifications but still teach yoga because they have been practicing it for many years.