What Kind of Yoga Do You Do?

Most people know yoga is ancient. Fewer know it is also, in its current form, surprisingly modern — a hybrid of two very different rivers that converged only in the last hundred years.

The story begins, as the best Indian stories do, at the water’s edge. Shiva — Adi Yogi — is sitting with his partner Parvati, sharing the secrets of the universe. Matsendranath, a fish in the pond, overhears every word. Shiva sees the fish listening, and instead of being annoyed, tells him: you will be reincarnated on earth to carry this knowledge forward.

Hence, Patanjali arrives. Considered a reincarnation of Matsendranath, he was the first sage to gather the scattered threads of yogic wisdom into a single coherent text — the Yoga Sutras — the very one that yoga teacher trainees study today, usually while sipping oat lattes and quietly panicking about their practicum.

But Patanjali’s Sutras were focused almost entirely on the mind. Asana appears in exactly three of the 196 sutras — three — described simply as “sthiram sukham asanam”: the posture should be steady and comfortable. The physical practice as we know it emerged much later, having been nearly lost during a thousand years in which the body was considered spiritually suspect, and was ultimately revived in the late 19th century when Swami Vivekananda brought refined yogic concepts to the West — where they collided, productively, with European physical culture.

Because the body is understood as a microcosm of the cosmos, the yogis laid out an extensive internal map showing how to raise one’s own energy to its highest expression. “Atha yoga anushasana” — yoga is a self-imposed discipline. A point where mind, body and breath converge until the mind becomes, as the texts describe it, a laser-sharp beam.

If you’re in a beautiful pose but your thoughts are running a commentary on everything from the playlist to your grocery list, you are not yet in yoga. You are in stretching mode.

To make this deceptively large ask — the stilling of the mind — more navigable, the yogis divided the practice into three primary paths.

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  Bhakti yoga is the path of devotion and surrender: kirtan singing, satsang, the devotional ecstasy of Mirabai pouring her love into song. It asks you to feel your way to oneness.

• Gyan yoga is the path of knowledge: the discernment between what is real and what is not, the slow dissolution of the ego through study and inquiry.

• Karma yoga is the path of right action — the doer’s path. You act fully, completely, without attachment to the outcome. You go on a date without worrying about where it will lead. You walk into the important meeting fully prepared but without white-knuckling the result. You offer the work freely. That’s a Karma yogi in action.

Yoga is not one thing on a dial. It is a two-dimensional landscape, and where a practice sits on that landscape determines almost everything about what it will do to you and for you.

At one end: the sympathetic nervous system — active, heat-building, cardiovascular. Targets superficial muscles. Builds strength and stamina. This is the yoga of effort.

At the other: the parasympathetic nervous system — rest and digest, deep tissue, meridians and joints. Targets the body’s connective architecture. This is the yoga of surrender.

Most practitioners spend years in one half of this spectrum without knowing the other half exists. That is a little like learning to play only the top register of a piano.

Beyond all styles of yoga practice, the Sangha is the heart — your community that drives you forward, keeps you steady in your practice and holds you safe. Find that and you’ve found yourself a catalyst that ignites beyond self-motivation.