In its technical sense, the word yoga refers to that enormous body of spiritual values, attitudes, precepts and techniques that have been developed in India over the past five millennia and may be regarded as the foundation of Indian civilisation.Yoga is also the generic name for the various paths of ecstatic self-transcendence. By way of extension, the word yoga has also been applied to those traditions that have been directly or indirectly inspired by the Indian sources, such as Tibetan yoga (Vajrayana Buddhism), Japanese yoga (Zen) and Chinese yoga (Ch'an). In a more restricted sense, the term yoga stands for the system of classical yoga, as codified by the sage Patanjali around the second century; in his 196 Sutras lies much but not all of the root of the physically based yoga many of us practise today.

To forget the wider and deeper body of yoga is to ignore the heart of it, the energy inherent in its history. It isn't that we need, in the 21st century, to adhere to the past, to slavishly follow a Patanjali, the Kula-Arnava-Tantra (an esoteric medieval tantra yoga), the little known Hatha-Sanketa-Candrika (Moonlight on the Conventions of Hatha), the proto-yoga of the Upanishads of the Vedic civilisation, the dissolving universe of Laya Yoga or even the 20th century Sri Aurobindo's modern synthesis Integral Yoga, which wants the supramental divine truth consciousness manifested in each of us. It is rather that we need to be aware of the depth and the roots of what we are doing to draw from that past well of energy. After all, some of us practise yoga two hours a day, many 30 minutes and many more a couple of hours a week. So if we merely follow a set of yoga moves prescribed by a teacher, we are skimming on the surface of something we don't understand. We pay our money and move our bodies. Being more aware brings the nature of the whole exercise into our thoughts, our tissues and our cells.

If I start my yoga practice this way, perhaps with one morsel of new awareness, I am more open, more alive, more conscious and, often, more supple because there are the images of history to work with and to be guided by. What I can visualise I can move into. I can communicate, almost talk to the sages, not in spoken words but on a cellular level, in a transfer of body energy through that thin line of continuance down time. Then, too, I am not alone as I sit on my yoga mat, not just this one body going through gymnastic yoga moves. We need to remember also that in more recent times, when the 20th century yoga teacher T S Krishnamachara, the greatest exponent of Hatha Yoga in that century, from whom Iyengar, Pottabi Jois and TKV Desikachar descend, came to prominence at a time in the world when gymnastics were becoming popular, people were beginning to take off their covering clothes and move their bodies more freely. Indeed Krishnamachara, when invited to teach in his palace by the Maharajah of Mysore, was given the Maharajah's brand-spanking-new gymnasium to teach in. Suddenly, an ascetic and academic moved into a very physical space. Twentieth century yoga, rather athletic and gymnastic, was born.