Beyond the timeline
Soul Fuel Vol. 7 traces some of the philosophical and historical streams that shaped Yoga, from the Vedas and the inner enquiry of the Upanishads to Patanjali’s Eight Limbs, Tantra and Hatha Yoga. A small number of printed copies have been shared with interested Yoga students.
The history overview raises the question: how did these different ideas become the many ways of practicing Yoga we encounter today?
The single word Yoga can describe ‘any technique of mystic union’ and can also be used as a broad term for Indian spiritual discipline. Then there are particular forms or ‘organising principles’, such as Bhakti and Karma Yoga. Yoga can mean devotion, service, philosophical enquiry, meditation, mantra, practices involving breath and subtle energy, or a posture-based asana class at a local studio or gym. Some forms have developed over thousands of years. Many draw from several traditions and periods of Yoga’s evolution.
What most of us encounter today is modern posture-based Yoga. It draws from Hatha Yoga, Patanjali’s Eight Limbs and several later teaching traditions, alongside more recent influences from physical culture and movement.
This can make Yoga’s contemporary landscape difficult to understand. Karma Yoga, Kundalini Yoga, Kriya Yoga, Hatha Yoga and Vinyasa Yoga all carry the same word while describing very different kinds of practice.
One word, many forms of Yoga
Yoga philosophies span thousands of years and explore this thing called life. Why India, though? Why is it considered the home of Yoga?
The word yoga can be traced to the Rig Veda. It did not yet carry all the meanings it later acquired. The Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, Yoga Sutras, Tantric traditions and Hatha texts developed within Indian cultural and spiritual traditions. This long history is the basis for India being recognised as the home of Yoga.
The word Yoga itself comes from the Sanskrit root yuj, meaning to yoke, join, unite.
It took me a while to understand that these different forms of Yoga are describing different things.
Some explore the mind and how we understand life.
Some are paths expressed through action, devotion or enquiry.
Others are full systems passed from teacher to student through particular traditions. Many of the styles on studio timetables grew mostly around physical postures, with contemporary movement practices influencing their development.
Philosophical frameworks
This is the layer that asks the bigger questions. Mind, consciousness, suffering, action, liberation.
The Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, the many traditions under Tantra, these don’t add up to one single philosophy, even though people often talk about them like they do. They came from different periods. Sometimes they’re drawing on the same ideas. Sometimes they land somewhere completely different on what the self actually is, or the body, or what practice is even for.
Soul Fuel Vol. 7 showcases a few of these historical streams if you want the fuller picture. And Patanjali’s Eight Limbs get their own deep dive in the next post, The Eight Limbs Lifestyle.
Paths, systems, lineages and styles
Yoga can mean a path built around action, devotion, enquiry or meditation.
It might mean a structured system of practices or a lineage handed from teacher to student across generations. It may also be a modern style built mostly around asana, which is probably what most of us experience first.
Lineage is interesting. I have struggled to follow it because history text is not where my attention naturally goes.
Ashram life here in New Zealand gave me a lived experience of lineage. Swami Karma Karuna studied under Swami Satyananda and Swami Niranjanananda of the Bihar School of Yoga. Through her, their teaching and the wider traditions behind it became part of daily life: early morning Bhakti Yoga, mantra chanting, caring for the land, assisting with retreats and exploring Karma Yoga through action itself.
A class you walk into today might actually be pulling from three or four different historical streams at once, even if it’s just labelled “Yoga” on the timetable.
Asana, the physical postures, is one piece of Patanjali’s Eight Limbs. Ethics, self-discipline, breath, concentration and meditation are there too. For most people, asana is where it begins. It’s the door in.
From Hatha Yoga to the modern Yoga class
The Yoga most commonly encountered in studios and gyms today places asana, or physical posture, near the centre of the practice.
Historically, Hatha Yoga meant something much bigger than the physical class many of us know today.
The fifteenth-century Hatha Yoga Pradipika, which I have not yet read, is attributed to Svatmarama. Its four chapters move through asana, pranayama and purification practices, mudra and bandha, then meditation and samadhi. Kundalini runs through these teachings. Posture sits within a much wider system working with the body, breath, mind and energy.
Some familiar postures have much older histories. Lotus, Peacock, Bow, Seated Forward Fold and Savasana appear in premodern Yoga texts. The Warrior poses and the standing balance we now call Half Moon emerged within twentieth-century Yoga. Sun worship is ancient. The flowing Sun Salutation sequence familiar to us today was systematised and popularised during the 1920s.
From the late 1800s through the first half of the 1900s, Indian teachers began experimenting with how they were taught and linked together. Older Hatha Yoga practices met Indian wrestling and physical culture, European gymnastics and early scientific research into Yoga’s effects on the body. This was also happening under British colonial rule and alongside India’s growing independence movement.
A meeting of different physical traditions
India already had its own rich physical traditions long before colonial rule ever arrived. Wrestling. Vyayama, a Sanskrit term for exercise and physical training.
Colonial rule brought European gymnastics and organised PE into schools, and something interesting happened.
Indian teachers started experimenting across all of it. Taking Hatha Yoga and mixing it with strength work, repetition, new ways of thinking about training a body. That mixing is actually where a lot of what we now think of as “normal” yoga comes from: standing postures, flowing sequences, sun salutations, that whole emphasis on strength and flexibility and stamina.
Colonial narratives painted Indian bodies as weak or undisciplined and in need of Western correction. Movement, repetition and physical training were already part of Indian practice and had been for centuries. India was not waiting for gymnastics to teach it how to move.
If you want to read more about this phenomenon, there’s a paper in the Journal of Yoga Studies that gets into this properly.
Yoga, health and national strength
The political layer to this is a bigger one than I expected when I first started reading into it.
Indian physical-culture movements pushed back against the colonial framing, hard. Strength, discipline, health, these got reframed as expressions of cultural pride.
Yoga came to hold two roles at once: an ancient inheritance and a modern system for building capable, healthy bodies. Physical practice became tied to self-reliance, national strength and the independence movement itself.
Yoga’s spiritual and philosophical dimensions continued. Certain physical practices were pulled forward, reworked and placed front and centre because they suited the moment.
Bringing Yoga into the laboratory
Some Indian teachers also began using scientific research and medical language to explain Yoga.
Shri Yogendra founded The Yoga Institute in Bombay in 1918 and presented Yoga as a practical approach to health for people with homes, families and jobs. Swami Kuvalayananda founded Kaivalyadhama in 1924 and established the research journal Yoga Mimamsa. He investigated the physiological effects of asana, pranayama, cleansing practices and other yogic techniques using the scientific equipment available at the time.
Their work helped move Yoga into laboratories, clinics and educational institutions. Breathing, circulation, heart activity, abdominal pressure and other physiological responses could now be measured and discussed through the emerging languages of anatomy, physiology and medical science.
This changed how people talked about Yoga. Traditional language remained, alongside a developing vocabulary drawn from anatomy, physiology and medicine.
This work helped lay the foundations for modern Yoga therapy. Yoga had long carried ideas about health and healing. Teachers and institutions began adapting practices to individual conditions and exploring them as therapeutic interventions. That field has continued to grow. Yoga therapy has its own scope and should stay within what training and evidence can support.
People who shaped modern Yoga
The teachers, schools and overlapping histories of modern Yoga can become confusing. I have been dipping into this subject for more than five years, with some help to pull the information together, check the details and make it easier to understand.
Modern Yoga developed through many people and institutions. These seven teachers help trace two of its most influential streams: the posture-based methods connected with Krishnamacharya, and the integrated traditions that travelled through Sivananda into the Bihar School of Yoga.
T. Krishnamacharya | A teacher who kept adapting
1888–1989
Krishnamacharya taught at the Mysore Palace from the 1930s, experimenting with dynamic sequences that combined posture, breath and movement. His teaching helped shape much of the physical Yoga practiced around the world today.
His approach changed across his lifetime and according to the person in front of him. He never travelled outside India, yet his students carried his influence around the world.
B.K.S. Iyengar | Precision, props and possibility
1918–2014
B.K.S. Iyengar developed a precise approach to alignment and brought close attention to how a posture is experienced inside the body.
His use of props began practically. Walls, ropes, bricks, belts, chairs and bolsters gave people different ways to work with a posture. The practice could then meet a wider range of bodies.
K. Pattabhi Jois | Learning the sequence by heart
1915–2009
Pattabhi Jois codified and popularised the set sequences known internationally as Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga.
Students gradually memorise the sequence and practice largely at their own pace as the teacher moves around the room. This became known as Mysore-style practice, named after the Indian city where Jois taught.
It is an energetic, disciplined method and is distinct from Patanjali’s eight-limbed system, also called Ashtanga Yoga. The serious harm associated with Jois’s use of authority is acknowledged in the side note later in this article.
Indra Devi | Yoga goes to Hollywood
1899–2002
Indra Devi was born Eugenie Peterson in what is now Latvia. She studied with Krishnamacharya, became one of his first prominent female students and helped make Yoga more accessible to women.
Her life took her from Europe to India, China, Hollywood and later Latin America. Along the way she became an Indian film actor, opened a Yoga studio in Los Angeles and taught actors and other public figures. Her life almost reads like a novel.
Swami Sivananda | A little of everything
1887–1963
Swami Sivananda was a medical doctor before becoming a swami. In 1936, he founded the Divine Life Society in Rishikesh. His integrated approach included service, devotion, meditation, philosophy, asana and pranayama.
He was also an incredibly prolific writer, producing hundreds of books and pamphlets. His concise instruction captures his approach: “Serve, love, give, purify, meditate, realise.” He honoured many religious frameworks through a shared emphasis on doing good for humankind.
Swami Satyananda | The creator of Yoga Nidra
1923–2009
Swami Satyananda arrived at Sivananda’s ashram in 1943 and lived there for twelve years. He founded the Bihar School of Yoga in 1963, developing a system that brought together asana, pranayama, mantra, meditation, kriya, kundalini practices and Yoga Nidra.
Drawing on older tantric practices, including nyasa, he created the structured system of Yoga Nidra now practiced around the world. He recognised the threshold between waking and sleep as a space where awareness could remain present as the body rested.
Swami Niranjanananda | From techniques to lifestyle
1960–
Swami Niranjanananda came to live with Satyananda at the Bihar School of Yoga when he was four years old and later became his spiritual successor.
He continued developing Bihar Yoga through education, research and publishing. His work places growing emphasis on Yoga as a way of living. Techniques form one part of a wider practice expressed through daily actions, awareness and relationships.
Together, these teachers shaped sequences, schools, institutions and different ways of understanding what Yoga could become. Their methods sometimes overlap and sometimes move in different directions. The word Yoga now reaches from highly physical classes to meditation, devotion, service, personal enquiry and an entire way of living.
From influential methods to modern styles
These teaching traditions help explain why there are now so many flavours of posture-based Yoga. Researching them accurately took a while. There are a lot, and the names overlap in confusing ways.
Some styles centre one quality of the practice. Vinyasa and Flow keep movement continuous and breath-linked. Power and Forrest increase the physical intensity. Iyengar emphasises precision and alignment. Ashtanga follows a fixed sequence. Yin holds postures for longer periods. Restorative uses support and stillness to reduce physical effort.
Jivamukti, Anusara and Kripalu bring postures together with their own philosophy or devotional elements. Scaravelli-inspired Yoga works with breath, gravity and the spine, more felt than performed.
Some names describe the room, equipment or intended students: Hot, Aerial, Chair, Prenatal and Children’s Yoga.
Hatha Yoga also carries more than one meaning. Historically, it is a varied tradition involving the body, breath, cleansing practices, mudra, bandha and subtle energies. On a modern studio timetable, “Hatha” often describes a slower, steadily paced posture class.
Many established systems can be traced through particular teachers and training traditions. More descriptive modern styles may draw from several sources.
This raises a fair question about what qualifies someone to teach. Historically, authority was often conferred through a long relationship with a teacher or guru. My own route began with years of personal practice, followed by a period of ashram life and then formal teacher training.
The 200-hour teacher training most people picture now is relatively recent. Yoga Alliance was established in 1999 and introduced voluntary standards for teacher training. The meaning of “qualification” has changed across periods and traditions. Learning to teach still takes time, practice and guidance from people with deeper experience.
A different perspective on familiar Yoga
Mark Singleton’s Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice examines how Indian physical culture, European gymnastics and the international exercise movement contributed to the development of the asana practice many of us recognise today.
This perspective places modern posture-based Yoga within Yoga’s continuing evolution. It shows a tradition drawing from different sources and responding to the needs and values of each period.
The Four Paths
Golden Bay, on top of a crystal mountain, surrounded by yogis. That’s where I first came across this framework of four paths: Karma, Bhakti, Jnana and Raja.
They were presented as ancient wisdom. Curiosity made me look further, and I am still understanding, through practice, what I think of it all.
The Bhagavad Gita develops paths of action, knowledge and devotion, with meditation running through it too. Threads of all four appear across Indian traditions, long before anyone arranged them into this outline of four distinct paths.
I have struggled with the Bhagavad Gita. Every translation I’ve picked up leans so hard on “He” and “God”. Those words sit too close to my early memories of church, which still haunt me today. Then there is the whole patriarchal aspect.
The text itself is religious. Translation choices can make its language sound particularly Christian and male. Either way, “ancient wisdom” keeps morphing as it moves through lineages, commentators, translators and teachers, each living in a particular time.
Vivekananda is part of the Four Paths story. This tidy four-box version most of us get handed is around 130 years old. Elizabeth De Michelis, a religious studies scholar, places Vivekananda at the centre of her influential 2004 book, A History of Modern Yoga. She describes his Raja Yoga as a foundational text in the development of Modern Yoga.
Vivekananda was clear about what he had done. He said he had “generalised” the paths into four: work, love, psychology and knowledge. His four were Karma, Bhakti, Raja and Jnana, adapted to different natures and temperaments.
It reads almost like a psychological map. Different people are drawn towards understanding, devotion, action or working directly with the mind.
His books Karma Yoga and Raja Yoga appeared months apart in 1896. The first edition of Raja Yoga sold out within months.
He crafted ancient material into a deliberate teaching framework for people encountering Yoga in another culture and time.
Vivekananda also said the divisions were not exclusive and that each blended into the others.
What each path actually looks like
Not always incense and silhouettes on a beach at sunrise.
More like this:
Karma Yoga is staying behind class to put away the bolsters because it needs doing. Helping someone through a difficult week without making yourself the hero of the story. Doing something useful, with care, without needing anyone to notice.
At Anahata, I came to understand this pathway through caring for the land because the land needed it. No one was keeping score.
Bhakti Yoga can be singing, chanting or repeating the same mantra each morning.
It could be honouring your own inner power through a dedicated daily practice. You may still question the ideas surrounding it. Something changes when you stop analysing the words for a moment and simply join in.
Mantra chanting gradually became part of how my day starts.
Jnana Yoga is curiosity turned towards life and yourself. Its purpose reaches beyond collecting information or becoming the most knowledgeable person in the room.
How are life’s challenges helping me understand myself better? What brings me contentment and joy, and how can I bring more of that into daily life? Which beliefs still feel true, and which am I ready to let go of? Beneath all the roles, habits and stories, who am I?
The knowledge becomes meaningful through the clarity it brings to how you live.
Raja Yoga feels like a thread running through my long relationship with Yoga.
Years of posture, breath, concentration and learning to observe my inner experience made Vipassana meditation feel like a natural extension of what was already there. Vipassana comes from a Buddhist tradition. The direct observation of the mind felt immediately familiar through my experience of Raja Yoga.
Ten days of silence. The sitting was never the hard part. What was hard was coming back out of it, having to open my mouth and speak again with nothing, really, to say.
These four pathways often meet. Most days you’re doing pieces of all of them without naming any of it: showing up, giving something without needing applause, questioning a belief you’ve carried for years, singing because something in you needs to, or sitting still long enough to notice what the mind is doing.
The four-path version gives you a language for what may already be part of your life.
Bhakti and Mantra: when sound becomes practice
Bhakti Yoga is usually described as the path of devotion.
This is where I can become wary. Devotion to a deity, a guru or anything requiring unquestioning belief is not for me. Yoga’s history gives us plenty of reasons to keep our discernment.
I understand devotion as giving yourself wholeheartedly to something. A person. A practice. Compassion, truth, service, the natural world, or a way of living that matters beyond our immediate wants.
We may already know this feeling. Caring for someone without needing recognition. Returning to a practice when motivation has disappeared. Singing with others, or becoming completely absorbed in something meaningful.
Bhakti gives this quality of the heart a place within Yoga.
Mantra as a practice
Mantra and Bhakti often meet through sacred sound. Mantra also appears in meditation, Tantra and other traditions.
A mantra may be a syllable, word, phrase or verse repeated aloud, whispered or silently. Some have a clear meaning. Others are valued as much for their sound, rhythm and traditional use as for their literal translation.
Mantra reaches back into the Vedic traditions, long before Yoga became so closely associated with posture. Verses were carefully composed, memorised and recited. Pronunciation and rhythm mattered. Sound itself was part of the practice.
Over time, mantra travelled through devotional traditions, Tantra, meditation and subtle-body practices. Different traditions used different mantras for different reasons. Like almost everything else in Yoga, there has never been only one version.
Mantra practice may include:
Japa: repeating a mantra aloud or silently, sometimes counted on a mala
Chanting: repeating sacred words, verses or sounds, alone or with others
Kirtan: musical, call-and-response chanting associated with Bhakti traditions
Meditation: returning attention to a mantra each time the mind wanders
These can overlap. A mantra might begin aloud, become quieter and eventually continue internally. Kirtan moves the other way, into music, shared rhythm and many voices.
AUM: more than the sound at the end of class
AUM is one of the oldest and most recognised mantras in Indian traditions. It is often called the sound of the universe. Its history and meaning reach much further than this familiar description.
The Mandukya Upanishad connects AUM with waking, dreaming, deep sleep and the silence beyond them. It uses the mantra to explore consciousness and the awareness beneath our changing experience.
AUM also appears in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. In Sutras 1.27–1.29, its repetition and contemplation are offered as a way of gathering the mind and moving through inner obstacles.
Its history reaches far beyond the pleasant sound we may now hear at the end of a Yoga class.
Today, people chant AUM for many reasons. It may be spiritual or devotional, or a practice of breathing, vibration and concentration. For some, it is simply the experience of making sound together.
When repetition changes attention
The mind repeats things all day anyway. Conversations. Worries. Plans. Old stories. Things we wish we had said differently.
Mantra gives it something else to repeat.
We offer the mind one sound or phrase and keep coming back. The mind will still wander. The practice is in the return.
Chanting is physical too. We have to breathe out to make sound. The exhalation lengthens and vibration moves through the chest, throat, face and head. In a group, separate voices begin to find a shared rhythm.
The experience may be calming, energising, awkward, absorbing or deeply moving. It will not be the same for everyone. Belief, memory, meaning, music and the people around us all shape what happens.
Devotion with discernment
Bhakti can hold both devotion and discernment.
Perhaps it is loving something enough to give it our full attention while remaining awake to what we are participating in.
Mantra is part of my daily practice, and I often include AUM at the end of a class. After movement, breathing and rest, it creates a different kind of closing. We pause, breathe and add our own voices to a sound that has travelled through thousands of years of practice and enquiry.
Some people chant with strong spiritual belief. Some begin with curiosity. Some feel the sound without needing to decide what it means.
I think there is room for all of that.
Kundalini Yoga: an ancient idea and a modern system
For someone used to posture-based Yoga, a Kundalini class can feel quite different.
It may combine repeated movement, strong breathing practices, mantra, music, meditation and deep relaxation. Some classes are physically demanding. Others are mostly seated. The repetition can be absorbing, energising and meditative.
Kundalini is often understood as a latent energy or potential within the body, which can be awakened and drawn upwards through the chakras.
The idea is much older than the modern style commonly called Kundalini Yoga. Teachings about kundalini and the subtle body developed across a range of Tantric and later Hatha traditions. Different texts and lineages explored these ideas in different ways, so there has never been one universally accepted Kundalini practice.
Kundalini practices may include mantra, pranayama, mudra, bandha, meditation and visualisation. They also appear within broader systems, including the Satyananda/Bihar tradition.
The system known as Kundalini Yoga as taught by Yogi Bhajan has a more recent history.
Yogi Bhajan, born Harbhajan Singh Puri, began teaching in North America in 1968 and established the Healthy, Happy, Holy Organization, known as 3HO, the following year. His system brought together postures, vigorous repeated movements, pranayama, meditation and relaxation with Sikh-derived mantra and chanting.
He presented these teachings as an ancient and previously secret lineage that he had been authorised to reveal. Scholar Philip Deslippe traced much of the physical practice to Swami Dhirendra Brahmachari, with Sikh mantra and devotional elements strongly influenced by Maharaj Virsa Singh. Deslippe describes the system as a distinctive twentieth-century synthesis. His peer-reviewed research is available through the University of California.
Yogi Bhajan was another controversial modern guru. His conduct and the wider pattern of spiritual authority and abuse within modern Yoga are explored in the side note following this section.
Kundalini Yoga today
The practice has continued through 3HO, independent teachers, studios, retreats and online spaces. Some teachers retain the complete system and its Sikh-derived presentation. Others use selected practices in a broader Yoga setting.
It is possible to explore the breath, movement, sound and repetition without wearing white or adopting every claim surrounding the subtle body. Experience gives us somewhere to begin: what happens in the body, how does attention change and what remains after the practice ends?
Side Note | When Yoga Teachers Fail
Yoga may offer practices for awareness, compassion and liberation. Its teachers and institutions remain human.
Yogi Bhajan, Pattabhi Jois, Bikram Choudhury, Swami Muktananda, Amrit Desai and others have faced accounts or findings involving sexual misconduct, exploitation or abuse of authority. The story surrounding Guru Jagat shows that harmful uses of spiritual authority are not limited to male teachers.
We have far less evidence about individual ancient teachers. We do know that many traditions developed within cultures shaped by caste, gender exclusion, hierarchy and restricted access to knowledge.
The contradiction matters. A person may teach something valuable and still cause harm. A practice may help people without making its founder beyond question.
Perhaps one of the most useful lessons Yoga can offer is discernment: experiencing what a practice offers while remaining willing to question the teacher, the institution and the story surrounding it.
Where the paths meet
The different paths, philosophies and systems of Yoga help us understand where practices came from.
A contemporary class might combine asana, pranayama, mantra and meditation. A teacher may also bring in non-harming, self-study or acting without attachment to results. Elements from different branches often meet within the same practice.
Knowing something of their different histories helps us appreciate what each offers.
More than one path at a time
The four paths introduced earlier are often associated with different temperaments and work with different parts of our lives:
Karma Yoga transforms how we act.
Bhakti Yoga engages devotion and the heart.
Jnana Yoga develops enquiry and discernment.
Raja Yoga cultivates attention and meditation.
These qualities can be present together.
Preparing a room before teaching may be an expression of Karma Yoga. Chanting AUM may carry an element of Bhakti. Questioning the thoughts and identities we mistake for a fixed self draws upon Jnana. Returning attention to the breath develops the concentration associated with Raja Yoga.
Even one action may include several paths. Caring for someone can involve service, love, awareness and discernment. Sitting in meditation may require discipline, enquiry, commitment to the practice and a willingness to let go of how we think the experience should be.
The paths help us recognise these different qualities without dividing ourselves between them.
What might meet in a Yoga studio today?
A Yoga class or personal practice may include:
Karma Yoga through teaching, acting or contributing without making recognition the reward
Bhakti Yoga through devotion, chanting, reverence or wholehearted participation
Mantra through the repetition of sacred sound for concentration, remembrance or connection
Jnana Yoga through self-enquiry and examining our assumptions
Raja Yoga through concentration, meditation and observation of the mind
Hatha Yoga through asana, pranayama, mudra, bandha and practices involving the body, breath and subtle energy
Kriya through deliberate sequences of movement, breath, mantra, concentration or visualisation
Kundalini practices through working with chakras, nadis and subtle energy
Patanjali’s Eight Limbs through ethics, personal observances, posture, breath, withdrawal of the senses, concentration and meditation
Much of the Yoga we encounter today has been shaped by more than one stream.
The practice beneath the name
Sometimes a name helps us understand a practice and where it came from.
Asana can show us how we respond to effort, resistance, ambition and self-judgement. It may become another task to perform or result to chase. The posture may look the same from the outside, while the inner experience is completely different.
Mantra can be repeated mechanically or with full attention. Service may come from generosity, or from believing that our own needs do not matter. Meditation may help us see more clearly, or become a way of avoiding something that needs our attention.
Yoga asks more of us than simply what we are doing. It also asks why we are doing it, how we are approaching it and what it is developing within us.
This is where the paths can keep one another in balance. Devotion needs discernment. Enquiry can be softened by compassion. Meditation matters when it influences how we live. Service is more sustainable when it includes self-awareness and healthy boundaries. Physical practice becomes more than exercise when it helps us notice how we meet challenge, change and limitation.
Yoga in therapeutic and contemporary settings
Yoga has always engaged with human suffering and our relationship with spirit, body and mind. Contemporary life brings real challenges, and Yoga has increasingly found a place within health and wellbeing services, offering support for people living with persistent pain, illness, anxiety and trauma, or moving through rehabilitation.
This movement beyond conventional classes has also asked more of Yoga. Practices need to recognise the body, health, history and experience of the person arriving.
Researchers have focused on particular parts of Yoga, including posture, breathing, meditation, attention and deep relaxation. Studies have explored their relationship with pain, mobility, balance, sleep, stress, emotional health and quality of life.
To study Yoga, researchers need to define the practice clearly enough for it to be repeated and measured. Healthcare practitioners need to understand what may be helpful, for whom and under what conditions. At the centre is a person who needs the practice to recognise their actual life.
Yoga teachers and therapists have continued to adapt practices in response to the people in front of them. This has contributed to the growth of Yoga Therapy, trauma-sensitive teaching, accessible and adaptive Yoga, and contemporary systems such as iRest. It has also produced newer scientific language, including non-sleep deep rest, or NSDR.
Yoga Therapy
Contemporary Yoga has supported the growth of Yoga Therapy, which adapts Yoga practices to a yogi’s spiritual, emotional, physical and mental health needs within an individualised therapeutic relationship.
Someone may come to Yoga Therapy while recovering from injury, managing persistent pain or fatigue, living with a long-term health condition, or moving through anxiety, grief or a major life change. Their practice may include movement, asana, pranayama, meditation, Yoga Nidra, mudra, relaxation, philosophy or changes to daily routines.
The practice is selected in response to the individual. One person may need to rebuild strength and trust in their body. Another may need support with breathing, sleep or the ability to rest. Someone else may be exploring how they relate to pain, illness or uncertainty.
Yoga teachers have always made adaptations for their students. The professional field of Yoga Therapy gives this work a more formal structure through specialist training, individual assessment, shared goals and an ongoing therapeutic relationship.
A general Yoga class offers a shared practice to a group. Yoga Therapy begins with the particular person and develops from there. It may sit alongside medical care, physiotherapy, rehabilitation or psychological support while drawing upon Yoga’s wider understanding of human experience.
Trauma-sensitive Yoga
Trauma-sensitive Yoga asks us to consider how a practice is experienced by someone whose sense of safety, trust or bodily control has been disrupted.
What feels calming to one person may feel vulnerable or overwhelming to another. Closing the eyes, becoming still, noticing internal sensations, changing the breath or receiving physical touch can each produce a different response.
Yoga guides need to hold this awareness within their teaching. Personally, I do all I can to ensure students retain authority over their own body, even in a general Yoga class.
Trauma-sensitive approaches place choice within the practice. Movements are offered as possibilities. Participants can keep their eyes open, change position, pause, move or decide that an instruction is not right for them. Predictability and clear language help people know what is happening and what will come next.
Trauma Center Trauma Sensitive Yoga, or TCTSY, is a particular therapeutic model developed by Dave Emerson and Jenn Turner in collaboration with psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk. It works with interoception, present-moment awareness and the experience of making choices through the body.
The influence of trauma-sensitive teaching can now be felt in many general Yoga classes. Teachers are thinking more carefully about consent, physical adjustments, invitational language and the authority held by the person leading the room.
The term trauma-informed is also used very loosely within contemporary wellbeing culture. Caring language and a peaceful room do not create clinical expertise. A Yoga teacher can work with awareness and sensitivity while remaining honest about their training and the limits of their role.
Yoga Nidra, iRest and NSDR
Yoga Nidra offers a fascinating example of what happens when a Yoga practice moves through tradition, modern psychology, healthcare and neuroscience.
The term Yoga Nidra has a much older and varied history. It appears in Sanskrit texts with meanings connected to divine sleep and advanced states of meditation or consciousness. These earlier references do not describe the structured guided sequence commonly recognised as Yoga Nidra today.
Swami Satyananda Saraswati developed and began presenting his systematic form of Yoga Nidra during the 1960s through the Bihar School of Yoga. He drew partly upon the tantric practice of nyasa, in which awareness or mantra is placed systematically at different points of the body. This became the rotation of awareness found within his Yoga Nidra system.
This is the lineage through which I trained at Anahata Yoga Retreat.
The Satyananda practice may include preparation and settling, sankalpa, rotation of awareness through the body, breath awareness, the experience of opposite sensations, visualisation and a gradual return to external awareness.
Deep relaxation opens the doorway. Yoga Nidra is a practice of pratyahara, the inward movement of the senses. It also involves self-observation, mental and emotional integration, and an exploration of awareness. The sankalpa brings in a personally chosen resolve or direction that carries meaning beyond relaxation.
Clinical psychologist Richard Miller later developed iRest, or Integrative Restoration. It draws from Yoga Nidra, meditation, nondual teachings and Western psychology. Its structured process includes establishing an inner resource, sensing the body and breath, meeting emotions and beliefs, and recognising the awareness in which these experiences arise.
iRest has been offered in hospitals, clinics, military and veterans’ programmes, and other settings where explicitly yogic or spiritual language may be less familiar. Its development shows how an existing practice can be reshaped for a different culture and purpose while retaining a visible relationship with Yoga Nidra.
Non-sleep deep rest, or NSDR, is a more recent term coined by neuroscientist Andrew Huberman. The label gathers several existing methods of conscious relaxation, including Yoga Nidra, hypnosis and some forms of meditation, under a scientific description.
NSDR makes deep rest understandable within a culture that may place greater trust in neuroscience than in Yoga. For some people, the language provides an accessible entrance. It also raises questions about what becomes less visible when an established practice receives a new name.
NSDR did not discover conscious deep rest. Yoga Nidra practitioners already knew this territory through a different framework, language and purpose. The territory is familiar. The signpost is new.
Yoga Nidra, iRest and NSDR are connected, although each name refers to something different. Yoga Nidra has a wider history and several modern systems. iRest is one contemporary adaptation with its own structure. NSDR is an umbrella term placed around a collection of deep-rest practices.
Adaptive and accessible Yoga
Adaptive and accessible Yoga question the assumption that a Yoga practice should look one particular way.
A chair, wall, bed or wheelchair can become part of the practice. A posture may be made smaller, supported differently or explored through imagination and breath. Someone may remain seated while others stand. The pace may change. Rest may become the central practice rather than something offered at the end.
Chair Yoga is one expression of this approach. Accessible Yoga reaches further. It includes disability, illness, injury, ageing, persistent pain and fatigue. It can also include sensory needs, neurodiversity, language, cultural belonging, financial access and whether a person feels welcome within the space.
The intention of the practice becomes more important than its resemblance to an ideal posture. The teacher looks for ways the experience can become available within this body, on this day.
These adaptations challenge narrow ideas about who Yoga is for, what a Yoga body looks like and what counts as a meaningful practice.
Yoga in translation
The developments in this section belong to different categories. Yoga Therapy is a professional field. Trauma-sensitive Yoga is an approach, with TCTSY as one defined therapeutic model. Yoga Nidra is a practice with older textual associations and several modern systems. iRest is a contemporary adaptation. NSDR is a recent scientific umbrella term. Adaptive and accessible Yoga provide principles that can influence many different styles.
Together, they show Yoga continuing to respond to human need.
Every translation changes something. It may allow Yoga to enter healthcare, reach people excluded from conventional classes, respond more carefully to trauma or offer practices through language that feels approachable. It may also narrow Yoga to measurable techniques, remove its philosophical context or make the original source harder to see.
Clear naming helps us recognise what these approaches contribute and see what has been selected, changed or left behind.
Yoga has never remained fixed. These contemporary forms allow us to witness its evolution while it is still taking place.
What are you already practicing?
We may already be living aspects of these teachings before we know their names.
Where does service appear in your life?
Karma Yoga can be present in teaching, caregiving, preparing food, supporting a friend or doing the unnoticed work that keeps a household running.
Karma Yoga asks us to notice how and why we act, including the care we give to our own needs.
Can we contribute without needing recognition? Can we care for others without abandoning our own needs? Can we give our best while accepting that we cannot control the outcome?
What receives your wholehearted attention?
Bhakti may be expressed through devotion to a deity, love, creativity, nature, truth, justice or care for another person.
What do you return to consistently? What matters even when no one is watching? What helps you remember there is more to life than your immediate worries?
Wholehearted participation and discernment can remain together. We can stay willing to question a practice, belief or teacher.
Do you use sound or repetition?
A mantra, prayer, familiar song, breath count or repeated phrase can give the mind somewhere to rest.
Rhythmic activities such as walking, swimming, knitting or dancing may have a similar effect. Repetition gathers attention when it feels scattered.
If mantra is part of your practice, notice what happens. Is it the meaning, the sound or the vibration that affects you? Does it calm the mind, awaken emotion or create a sense of connection?
If sacred language does not feel right for you, what other words, sounds or rhythms resonate with you?
What helps you see more clearly?
Self-enquiry may begin with a few simple questions:
Is this thought true?
What am I assuming?
Is my reaction about what is happening now, or something I have carried from the past?
What changes when I notice an emotion before acting from it?
Meditation helps us see how quickly attention is caught by memories, anticipation and habit. We notice where the mind has gone and begin again, leaving judgement out of the process as best we can.
What is your physical practice cultivating?
Asana may develop mobility, strength, balance and coordination. It can also show us how we respond to challenge, limitation and comparison.
Do we force when something does not happen quickly? Do we lose the breath while pursuing a shape? Can we recognise the difference between useful effort and strain? Can we adapt without seeing adaptation as failure?
The same posture can cultivate very different qualities depending on how we practice it. Asana may reinforce striving and self-criticism or develop patience, curiosity and respect for the body we have today.
What follows you beyond the mat?
The effects of Yoga move with you into daily life.
Does awareness of the breath create space before you react?
Does physical practice help you inhabit your body with greater care?
Does meditation help you notice a familiar thought without immediately believing it? Does non-harming influence how you speak to yourself and others?
Formal practice gives us somewhere to explore these qualities. Ordinary life shows us if they are becoming part of how we live.
We can understand where teachings came from, explore what they offer and pay attention to what we experience. Perhaps the most useful questions are:
Where does service appear in my life?
What receives my devotion?
What brings me back when my attention is scattered?
What helps me see myself more clearly?
What changes when Yoga becomes part of how I live?
One word may describe many Yogas. Their meeting place is within the way we act, attend, enquire, care and participate in our own lives.
Soul Fuel Vol 7
Soul Fuel Vol. 7 Yoga Evolution will be available here as a downloadable four-page guide for paid subscribers.