What impact has yoga made on the West?
I am doing a school project on the impact of yoga on Western Culture and I thought what a better way to go into this then to just simply ask people what their opinion is on the topic.
Any and all answers would be greatly appreciated to the above.
I feel that yoga has really invaded our Western lifestyle. It’s all over the place! My parents do yoga, my friends do yoga, there’s even yoga for the Wii! Pretty soon everybody’s going to be bent over backwards, palms flat on the ground, going everywhere in the ‘crab’ form.
It’s so pervasive that I even know of the crab form! I think yoga is changing the way we think and who we are, and making us, yes, physically fitter, but also more and more rigid and disciplined. The West is, at least partially, built up of a vast variety of individuality, and yoga is benignly taking that away from us.
Yoga has been developed in India by the Yogis. Its a kind of exercise which yogis of India use to do by sitting under a big tree or on a mountain or on the ground, closing their eyes and sitting like that for long periods.Yoga has left a very good impression especially in the western culture. Western people are eager to follow yoga. Many western people are impressed and are taking yoga classes nowadays. It has been introduced in the schools and colleges too.
This is an excellent question!
Yoga has been a part of the West for quite some time now, but it has “invaded” the West in stages.
Its first great wave came with the Theosophical Society, a western mystical sect (which is still around by the way) founded by Madam Blavatsky in 1875. Their way of mysticism involved embracing the Eastern philosophies of reincarnation, the development of Siddhis (powers) & the eventual Illumination of humankind as a whole. In fact, at one stage, they adopted an Indian man (then a boy) called J. Krishnamurti & groomed him to become the next world Messiah. Krishnamurti eventually rejected this notion (I think around the 1920s & 30s), but still continued to lecture about the benefits of Yoga & meditation.
The next great wave of Yoga to the west came with a man called Paramahansa Yogananda, though this great Yogi was groomed by his Guru in India with a mission to bring Yoga to the West. He is one of the first Yogis to study at university so that the Scholars of the West would accept him rather than treating him as an “Indian Holy man” joke. If you want to find out more about him, read his famous autobiography, “Autobiography of a Yogi”, a book that is still widely read today by spiritually minded Yogi(ni)s. This happened around the 1940s.
Of interesting note here is that during these two eras of Yogic intake, the Bible was often quoted alongside the Traditional Yogic (Vedic or Hindu) doctrines in order to make it easier for westerners to understand-remember that back then, the majority of the Western world was Christian. This is why Yogi has always been so accessible to other countries; it has usually (at least in modern times) worked from a standpoint of acceptance of other cultures and belief systems.
Since then, there have been additional waves of Yoga coming in.
Of particular note are the following:
BKS Iyengar popularized his own highly Asana (Posture) oriented style of Hatha Yoga, when he published “Light on Yoga”, probably the biggest selling posture Yoga book to date. Some of the other aspects were also included. In my mind, this is when the whole idea of Yoga being mainly ‘postures’ was erroneously accepted in the west. This book came out around the 50s (I think…) in India, and was first published in 1965 in English. An interesting note is that Iyengar’s guru was supposedly strongly opposed to the writing of this book, but Iyengar went ahead & wrote it anyway (don’t get me wrong, I love it; I still use it as a postural reference). Also of note is that Iyengar has written other, more philosophy based books.
The hippy era saw a revival of Yoga for it’s spiritual values again, though I’m not sure on the details, so I won’t write about it here.
Sri K. Pattabhi Jois popularized Ashtanga Vinyasa yoga (sometimes called power yoga), I’m not sure when but I think it may have started becoming popular in the west around the late 80s, though certainly by the early 90s, it was the Yoga to do (I practiced it for about 4-5 years back then). It is still quite popular, but Bikram Yoga is a new popular form (I’m not a fan-I tried it for 5 months; great for toning & fitness, but there is a total loss of Yoga values & philosophy-this is the opinion of most of the Yoga world, by the way).
Now there are many off shoots of Yoga (probably thousands). In the west, there seems to be two main types; Highly physical, & highly spiritual.
There are many other Yoga teaching & Gurus (such as Satyananda, Mahrishi & Sivananda) that came to the west, but if I were to list them all, this would turn into a large thesis!
There is something else that I would like to mention; in relation to your question, this is highly relevant. Did you know that before the West popularized Yoga, it was a dying art in India? In fact, it is believed by quite a few Yogi(ni)s that if westerners had not grabbed it when it did, that it may well have died out! So, even though Yoga has had a huge influence on the west & is now a firm part of mainstream culture, it is this same culture that has literally saved it in its homeland. It is only when it became popular in the west that it became popular in India again (in India, western culture is absolutely loved, even revered). If you look at it this way, you will start to realize that there may in fact be more western than Indian Yogis worldwide (as far as the rest of Asia, I’m not sure). Having said this, a would say that most of the Gurus are from India/Nepal/Pakistan though.