(Mind35)-What is the best Yoga Asana?

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Once someone asked Ramana Maharshi the same question. By the way, Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950) was a great Indian Yogi who spent years in meditation, before he started interacting with the world.

Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950)

Ramana was a bit puzzled by the question. He said that it does not really matter. What is more important is how you still your mind. You can sit on any comfortable seat and meditate.

What Ramana understood by the word Asana was as a seat on which you sit for Yoga practice. That is what the Sanskrit word asana actually means. It is a different matter though, in recent times, this word has acquired whole lot of new meanings and has almost become synonymous with Yoga.

Not so, originally. Probably, a century ago this word generally meant a seat on which you sit for practice. At the most. it meant a sitting posture and not any of the myriad acrobatic body postures that we talk about today.

One of the first Indian Yogis, namely Swami Vivekananda, who introduced Yoga to the western world, rarely talked about body postures or Asana. Though Swami Vivekananda did talk about concepts like Kundalini, that are part of Hatayoga, he left out the Asana concept of Hatayoga.

I remember reading the experience of one western Yoga researcher who spent several years in the Indian Himalayas. He writes that in his interactions with several Indian Yogis in the Himalayas, he rarely came across any mention about Yoga postures.

In fact, many of them did not even know anything about Yoga postures as we commonly talk about. The only posture they knew was the head-stand posture or the Sheershasana, which they call Vipareeta Karani!


If we go back to the source, i.e. the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali, you will find just one sentence defining what an Asana is all about. In Patanjali’s words, Asana is that which is stable and comfortable – Sthiram sukham Asanam.

But then our modern Yoga Gurus have their own explanation of what Patanjali meant in this single sentence 😉

The well-known Yoga Guru B.K.S. Iyengar who popularized Yoga in the west, was sometimes criticized for the overemphasis he gave for Yoga postures.

In one of the interviews, the interviewer mischievously asked Mr. Iyengar for the support in the original Yoga of Patanjali.

For a moment Mr. Iyengar seemed a bit irritated. But soon he explained that one sentence of Patanjali in his own way. Iyengar said Sthiram means eternal and Sukham means bliss, i.e. Asana is something that gives eternal bliss. But how does twisting and turning the body give eternal bliss, I wonder!

In another discussion with his students, Iyengar recollects how he came up with his version of Yoga.

Apparently, Iyengar’s Guru Krishnamachar, who was a teacher in the Palace Yoga school of the then princely state of Mysore in India, came up with a form of Yoga which was predominantly body oriented. Since the students were mostly either soldiers or members of the Royal family, Krishnamachar had to skip most of the meditative aspects of Yoga and retain only body centered practices to suite their mental makeup.

There are others who say that the King of Mysore who was a great scholar, had come up with a form of Yoga which is a mixture of ancient Indian martial arts and western gymnastics. And probably, Krishnamachar implemented it.

Whatever may be the reality, at least some of the Asanas we know of today as Yoga, did form part of Hatayoga which was propagated by the Nath mystics of the 12th to 15th century A.D. Modern teachers kept adding more and more Asanas and gave impressive Sanskrit names to them to make them sound archaic.

Hatayoga declares that Asana is the ‘real’ first step of Yoga. Hatapradeepika, the 15th century text of Hatayoga, lists health, stability and flexibility as the benefits of performing Asana. It also says that some of the Asanas strengthen the spine so that in later stages of practice, the mystic force Kundalini can pass through the spinal pathway without any obstruction.

Hatayoga defines many Asanas – mostly sitting postures, that are useful in raising of the mystic force Kundalini up the spine. That is the reason why Hatayoga gives so much importance to body postures.


Let us go back a bit, even beyond Patanjali and see how ancient Indian Yoga schools even before Patanjali defined Asana. We will discuss that in the next episode.

 

A series revolving around Mind – Science of Mind, Philosophy of Mind, Notions of reality, Mind modulation, Domains beyond Mind, and so on. © Dr. King 2019