By Dr. Jeremy David Engels

On June 21, for International Yoga Day, people will take out their yoga mats and practice sun salutations or sit in meditation. Yoga may have originated in ancient India, but today it is practiced all over the world.

In the United States, it was philosophers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau who first engaged with the philosophy of yoga in the 1830s. Yoga gained a wider American audience only in the late 1800s.

Today, part of yoga’s appeal is that it continues to be seen as a mystical, ancient tradition. However, as I’ve discovered in my research, the practice of yoga has gone through some profound shifts. Here are four.

1. Yoga for health and happiness

It was a Hindu reformer, Swami Vivekananda, who first introduced yoga to a larger audience.  Several electrifying addresses he delivered at the World’s Parliament of Religions, the world’s first global interfaith dialogue held in 1893 in Chicago, brought him instant fame. He then traveled around the U.S. for the next several years, giving lectures and teaching yoga.

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Vivekananda revived the tradition of an ancient Indian sage, Patanjali, that had been almost forgotten. Patanjali likely lived in India somewhere between the first century B.C. or the fourth century A.D. He claimed that the goal of yoga was isolation from existence and freedom from the bonds of mortal life.

According to Patanjali, to overcome suffering, individuals needed to renounce the very comforts and attachments that seem to make life worth living for many today. As the journalist Michelle Goldberg, author of “The Goddess Pose,” puts it, Patanjali’s yoga “is a tool of self-obliteration rather than self-actualization.”

No one today is likely to see yoga as a way to renounce their existence. Most people are drawn to yoga to find happiness, health, and compassion in everyday life.

2. Value of physical exercise

Most people today associate yoga closely with physical exercise and postures, known as asanas, designed to strengthen and stretch the body. There is more to yoga, however, than the physical. Yoga also encompasses devotion, contemplation, and meditation. In fact, the primary focus on the body would surprise both Patanjali and Vivekananda, who prioritized mental over physical exercise.

Patanjali treated the body with disdain, believing it to be a prison. He was emphatic that we are not our bodies, and that any attachment to our bodies is an impediment to yoga. Vivekananda echoed these thoughts. He treated asanas with scorn. Vivekananda argued that an obsessive focus on the body distracts from the true practice of yoga: meditation.

In contrast, contemporary practitioners embrace asana as central to yoga. Contemporary yogis recognize that the mind, and the soul, are embodied. By “getting smart in their yoga,” contemporary yogis attend to their bodies and also to their emotions because the health of the body impacts the ability to see clearly and act deliberately.

3. Focusing on the self

A central practice of yoga is self-study, known in Sanskrit as “svadhyaya.” In the tradition of Patanjali, this means “the reading of sacred scriptures.”

Today, svadhyaya has come to mean the study of oneself. People often take up the practice of yoga to lead happier, less stressed, and more compassionate lives. Yoga involves, as I argue in my book The Art of Gratitude, paying attention to one’s habits. Only by first noticing one’s habitual patterns does it become possible to change them.

Sacred texts, broadly understood, can help this practice of self-study, as they encourage reflection on deep and difficult questions that do not have easy answers. For today’s practitioners, these questions include: What is the purpose of life? How can I live an ethical life? And what would truly make me happy?

Ultimately, self-study resides at the heart of a healthy yoga practice. It allows yogis to recognize their deep connection to others and the world around them. This recognition of interdependence and interbeing is central to today’s yoga.

4.  Ethics of a yoga guru

In ancient practice, the relationship between a guru and a student was crucial. Today, the guru-student model is going through a shift. Yogis no longer train for years in their guru’s home, as was the practice in ancient India. Yogis instead practice in studios, in parks, at fitness centers, or at home on their own.

Still, many contemporary yoga teachers claim the title of “guru.”

However, some practitioners of yoga are calling for an end to the guru model, given that it comes with an inherent power, which opens the door to abuse. There are many examples of such abuse, with a more recent one being the case of Bikram Choudhury, the 73-year-old founder of Bikram yoga, who fled the country to avoid an arrest warrant in California in 2017 after being accused of sexual assault.

In the wake of the #MeToo movement in the United States and India, many yoga practitioners have initiated important conversations about the ethics of being a yoga teacher. At the heart of these conversations is how yoga teachers must, above all else, treat their students, who are often deeply vulnerable, with dignity and respect.

Ancient, but not timeless

Indeed, there is great power, and great mystique, in just how old yoga is. But as a professor of communication, I observe that one of the most common errors people make in daily conversation is to appeal to antiquity – what scholars call the “argumentum ad antiquitatem” fallacy – which says that something is good simply because it is old, and because it has always been done this way.

Yoga is ancient, but it is not timeless. By stopping for a moment to consider yoga’s past, we can recognize the crucial role that all of us can and must play in shaping its future.

About the Author

Dr. Jeremy David Engels investigates the rituals and rhetoric of oneness—how human beings talk about oneness, interconnectedness, interbeing, and union, and then how they attempt to enact their imaginative visions in action.

He is the author of The Ethics of Oneness: Emerson, Whitman, and the Bhagavad Gita, The Art of Gratitude, The Politics of Resentment: A Genealogy and Enemyship: Democracy and Counter-Revolution in the Early Republic. For his work, he has been awarded the Karl Wallace Award and the New Investigator Award from the National Communication Association. Jeremy is also a yoga teacher and the co-owner of Yoga Lab Studio in State College, PA.

yoga mats

sun salutations

sit in meditation

United States

philosophers

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Henry David Thoreau

yoga’s appeal

mystical

ancient tradition

Swami Vivekananda

World’s Parliament of Religions

Patanjali, ancient Indian sage

first century B.C.

fourth century A.D.

The Goddess Pose

self-actualization

physical exercise and postures

svadhyaya

The Art of Gratitude

Ethics of a yoga guru

Ancient

but not timeless

Dr. Jeremy David Engels

Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences, Pennsylvania State University

Hands over the heart in prayer pose. A little bow of the head. A gesture of respect. An acknowledgment of our shared humanity. And no touching.

As people the world over are choosing to ditch handshakes and hugs for fear of contracting the coronavirus, namaste is becoming the perfect pandemic greeting.

As a scholar whose research focuses on the ethics of communication and as a yoga teacher, I’m interested in how people use rituals and rhetoric to affirm their interconnectedness with one another – and with the world.

Namaste is one such ritual.

I bow to you

Originally a Sanskrit word, namaste is composed of two parts – “namas” means “bend to,” “bow to” or “honor to,” and “te” means “to you.” So namaste means “I bow to you.” This meaning is often reinforced by a small bow of the head.

In Hindi and a number of other languages derived from Sanskrit, namaste is basically a respectful way of saying hello and also goodbye. Today, namaste has been adopted into the English language, along with other words from non-English sources. Many words, when borrowed, keep their spelling but acquire new meanings. This is the case with namaste – it has shifted from meaning “I bow to you” to “I bow to the divine in you.”

For many American yoga teachers, beginning most likely with Ram Dass in the 1960s and 1970s, namaste means something like “the divine light in me bows to the divine light within you.” This is the definition of namaste I first learned and have often repeated to my students.

In the words of the popular American yoga teacher Shiva Rea, namaste is “the consummate Indian greeting,” a “sacred hello,” that means “I bow to the divinity within you from the divinity within me.”

Deepak Chopra repeats a similar definition on his podcast “The Daily Breath with Deepak Chopra”: namaste means “the spirit in me honors the spirit in you” and “the divine in me honors the divine in you.”

Namaste has a sacred connotation. When you bow to another, you are honoring something sacred in them. When you bow to another, you are acknowledging that they are worthy of respect and dignity.

I bow to the divine light in you

However, there are critics who say that global yogis have taken namaste out of its context. Some claim that the greeting has been infused with a religious meaning that doesn’t exist in Indian culture.

I see things differently. Many common salutations have religious roots, including adios, or “a Dios,” to God, and goodbye – a contraction of “God be with you.”

Most Indian religions agree that there is something divine in all individuals, whether it’s a soul, called the “atman” or “purusha” in Hinduism, or the capacity for awakening in Buddhism.

As I argue in my forthcoming book The Ethics of Oneness: Emerson, Whitman, and the Bhagavad Gita, this idea of bowing to the divine in others, also resonates with a deep spiritual inclination in American culture.

Beginning in the 1830s and 1840s, the influential philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, in dialogue with a number of other thinkers, invented a form of spiritual practice that encouraged Americans to actively address the divine soul in others every time they spoke.

Of particular note is that Emerson often used the metaphor of light to imagine this inner divinity, likely because of his great admiration for the Quakers, whose Christian denomination holds that God lives inside of us all in the form of an “inner light.”

The definition of namaste as “the divine light in me bows to the divine light in you” is very much in the spirit of both Indian religions and 19th-century traditions of American spirituality.

Namaste as an ethical commitment

In today’s global yoga culture, namaste is typically said at the end of class. As I understand, for yogis, saying namaste is a moment of contemplating the virtues associated with yoga – including peacefulness, compassion, and gratitude and how to bring those into one’s daily life.

I asked Swami Tattwamayananda, the head of the Vedanta Society of Northern California in San Francisco and one of the world’s leading authorities on Hindu ritual and scripture, how he felt about Americans like me saying namaste.

He responded: “It is perfectly appropriate for everyone, including Westerners like yourself to say namaste at the end of your yoga classes.” He also reiterated that namaste means “I bow down to you” – in the sense that I bow down to the divine presence in you.

One need not be a Hindu, or a Buddhist, or a yoga teacher to say namaste. Namaste can be as religious or secular as the speaker desires. What matters most, I believe, is the intention behind the word namaste. When you bow to another, the question to consider is this: Do you truly recognize them as a fellow human being worthy of dignity, bonded in shared suffering and a shared capacity for transcendence?

This recognition of our interconnectedness is what namaste is all about – and exactly what we need during the pandemic.

About the Author

Jeremy David Engels investigates the rituals and rhetoric of oneness—how human beings talk about oneness, interconnectedness, interbeing, and union, and then how they attempt to enact their imaginative visions in action. He is the author of The Ethics of Oneness: Emerson, Whitman, and the Bhagavad Gita (Chicago, 2021), The Art of Gratitude (SUNY, 2018), The Politics of Resentment: A Genealogy (Penn State, 2015), and Enemyship: Democracy and Counter-Revolution in the Early Republic (Michigan State, 2010). For his work, he has been awarded the Karl Wallace Award and the New Investigator Award from the National Communication Association. Jeremy is also a yoga teacher and the co-owner of Yoga Lab Studio in State College, PA.

Prayer pose

 Namaste

Pennsylvania State University

gesture of respect

 Fear of the coronavirus

American yoga teachers

Indian greeting

Hinduism

The Ethics of Oneness

the Bhagavad Gita

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Swami Tattwamayananda

Vedanta Society of Northern California