Tory Schafer

Oh, how far do you want to go back, Stan?

Just a day or two.

What most people in the West consider yoga today, which as you referred to with bending, is actually quite new.

Really, it became popular in...

the early 1900s, like 1927 ish, right around there is when Chris Macharia in India was asked to create a school actually for a bunch of gymnasts is how the story goes.

And prior to that, you can go thousands of years and most people will relate it back almost to Hindu faith in India.

But there's some healthy debate even around that, because that's when the first written word was starting to come around.

And so we find it in a text called the Rig Vedas, and it talks about how there was this yoke, which the word yoga loosely translates to yoke, connecting to the goddess of dawn and helping us to be connected to the universe.

But even then, philosophers will often take a look at that and go, you know, that still wasn't an introspective practice.

It wasn't much till later in the era of what they call the Upanishads, which was a bunch of texts when it started to be internalized about a practice about how do I refine my own self?

But there's even history going back.

way further before that in the uh oh the indus valley so northwest india where they'll find these stone medallions of people meditating which was way before the hindu faith even came around so

In our yoga teacher training that we run, we often go, well, if the word yoga means to yoke or to connect and is about relationship, when did that first come about?

And if you want to look at it from the scientific perspective, really the big bang is when yoga started.

it's going you know there are atoms that vibrate throughout the universe you know there's more and more science that goes you know we're all made of stardust there is frequency and vibration and energy in all things so when you look at it from a perspective of connection yoga's always been there our practice today then is about going can we remember that we're connected

Because that's the issue, is we often start to look at my life from my perspective and my job, my title, and all of a sudden I disconnect and I segregate.

And rather than living in this world of inclusion, we're meant to be connected.

Yeah.

Um, and we can even tie it back to the history a little bit.

Because, you know, if we look at the early 1900s of where this modern day of physical yoga, the poses really started to become, you know, hate to call it a trend, but that's what it was doing prior to that.