9781422287040

AN ANCIENT TRADITION Yoga has become really popular in North America in the last few years. However, yoga has a long history that reaches back many thousands of years. To understand the origins of yoga, you have to go back a long way—3,000 to 5,000 years, in fact! We don’t exactly know when yoga was created, since people were practicing yoga even before they were writing. Yoga means “to join or yoke together,” referring to the mind and the body. Early yoga practitioners wanted healthier, stronger minds back then, just like they do today. The first evidence of yoga comes from some stone carvings of figures doing yoga found in the Indus Valley. The stone carvings are around 5,000 years old, though older evidence might still be found someday. Then, once writing came along, people started writing about yoga. Yoga isn’t rooted in any particular religion, and it’s not a religion it- self. Hinduism and Buddhism, along with other religions, adopted some yoga principles, but they came after the creation of yoga. Yoga doesn’t involve worshipping a god or gods, but it has been used in religions for that purpose. The Vedas—the sacred scriptures of Hinduism written somewhere between 1500 and 1000 bce —talk about yoga. Later on, more scrip- tures called the Upanishads continued to describe yoga in relation to Hinduism. Even later (around 500 bce ), a text called the Bhagavad-Gita described yoga practice in detail and set out some of the main types of yoga practice at the time. A scholar named Patanjali also wrote a book called Yoga Sutras many hundreds of years ago, which built on the ear- lier Hindu works. He recorded popular thoughts about yoga and ways to practice yoga. Yoga students today still follow the same principles and practices today. For a long time, yoga was only practiced in Asia. In the late 1800s, though, it traveled to the United States. It became really popular in the 1960s, as people became more interested in Asian religion and ways of life, and Indian yoga teachers traveled to the United States. More

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