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Whose Yoga? A Preview of Yoga History, Philosophy & Ethics

· @ErikaSmithIluszko

“Yoga is 5,000 years old”

You have heard it. Maybe you have said it. I certainly have. It is printed on studio walls and repeated in yoga teacher trainings around the world: yoga is 5,000 years old.

Where does that number come from? Usually from one small steatite (soapstone) seal found at Mohenjo-daro, about 3.5 centimetres across, showing a seated figure with a horned headdress. In 1931 a British archaeologist working for the colonial government called it a “proto-Śiva” sitting in a yogic posture. That one reading travelled into almost every yoga history ever written.

Scholars have questioned it for decades. The figure may be sitting on a throne. The details are worn and disputed. No Indus text explains it. And while the city it comes from flourished some 3,900 to 4,600 years ago, there is no clear evidence that anyone there practised yoga at all.

So why does the number survive? Who needed yoga to be that old, and why?

That question opens the module I will teach at Manas this November: Module 2, Yoga Philosophy, History & Ethics. This blog is a preview, and an invitation to start asking these questions with me now.

Not a line, a braid

Yoga history is usually drawn as a straight line: the Vedas, then Patañjali, then Haṭha yoga, then your local studio. It is a tidy story. It is also mostly wrong.

Yoga is a braid. Some strands are Vedic. Many are not: the wandering ascetics at the edge of Vedic society, the Jain and Buddhist śramaṇa movements, Dravidian, Adivasi and folk traditions that rarely made it into Sanskrit texts. These strands crossed, borrowed and argued with each other for centuries.

One of the earliest glimpses we have is a hymn in the Ṛgveda about a long-haired sage, “girdled with the wind”, intoxicated by silence. There is no posture in it. No technique. No system. Just silence, and a life lived outside the village and its rules.

In the module we practise holding two voices at once. Tradition holds that Śiva is Ādiyogi, the first yogi. That is a living, sacred teaching. Evidence suggests that the word yoga first meant yoking horses to a chariot, and only later became a discipline of the mind. Both can be taught in the same room. The harm begins when one is presented as the other.

And then there is the part of the story most of us were never told properly. Postures themselves are old: Haṭha texts from the 15th century onward describe dozens of them, and one 18th-century manual, the Haṭhābhyāsapaddhati, lists 112, including dynamic sequences and postures on ropes. What is new, roughly a hundred years old, is the studio class as most of us know it: posture as the whole practice, flowing sequences, yoga sold as exercise. That format grew in colonial India, from Haṭha roots, Indian wrestling and physical culture, nationalist politics and international gymnastics, and then from global commerce.

Does that make it less real? I don’t think so. But it asks something of us: if we know where our practice comes from, can we keep selling it as timeless?

Who is watching?

Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra builds its whole teaching on one distinction. There is the seer: pure awareness, which never changes. And there is the seen: everything that can be observed. The body. The breath. Your thoughts, your moods, even your sense of being “me”.

We suffer, Patañjali says, because awareness takes itself to be what it sees (2.17). Yoga is the stilling of the mind’s fluctuations, and then “the seer rests in its own nature” (1.2–1.3).

Read that slowly and something strange happens. If your thoughts are part of the seen, who is reading this sentence?

The Upaniṣads push the question further. Advaita Vedanta, the non-dual philosophy at the heart of how we practise at Manas, says that the Self is not separate from the whole. Its method is neti, neti: not this, not this. Not the body, not the breath, not the thinker.

I love these texts. I also want us to read them with our eyes open. Most surviving Sanskrit texts were written by and for elite, male, often upper-caste authors. So alongside “what does this text say?” we will keep asking:

  • Who wrote this, and when?
  • Why was it told? To teach, to win patrons, to argue with rivals, to sell?
  • Who is missing from it? Not absent from history. Just left out of the record.

Can a teaching be liberating and exclusive at the same time? I think it can. That is exactly why it deserves careful reading.

Ethics comes first

Patañjali puts the yamas and niyamas before posture and breath. Not as a rulebook bolted on afterwards, but as the ground the rest stands on. A mind tangled in harm, lies and craving cannot become still.

He calls the five yamas a mahāvrata, a great vow, “not limited by birth, place, time or circumstance” (2.31). Read that again. The word for birth is jāti. The early commentary reads it as kind of being: a fisherman who harms only fish is still not keeping the vow. The same word later came to name caste. Either way, the vow admits no exceptions by birth. No exceptions for convenience. No “just this once”.

The yamas are relational, so they never stay on the mat. They ask about systems, not only individuals. Caste kept many people from the knowledge yoga carries. Colonial rule distorted it. Today, commerce and racism shape who feels welcome in a studio, and who gets to teach.

Read through that lens, each yama asks something new:

  • Ahiṃsā (non-harm): who is harmed, or quietly excluded, by how we offer yoga?
  • Satya (truthfulness): do we tell the truth about yoga’s history, including the uncomfortable parts?
  • Asteya (non-stealing): do we take a culture’s practices, symbols or credit without acknowledgement?
  • Aparigraha (non-grasping): do we hoard access, or share it?

And then there is the hardest conversation. Several of the most influential figures in modern yoga have faced credible, well-documented allegations of sexual abuse and abuse of power. The patterns repeat: unquestioned authority, devotion that silences doubt, touch without consent, communities that protect the teacher instead of the student.

We will name this history in the module, by name. Not to reject everything these lineages teach, but to ask: what would it take to build a yoga community where no teacher is beyond question, including me?

What we will do together

This is not a lecture series. Every chapter ends on the mat or the cushion, because philosophy here is something you practise, not only something you know. Over three contact weekends and one self-study weekend we will move through:

  • The ancient roots of yoga. The Indus seals, the śramaṇa movements, the long-haired sage, and how to tell tradition from evidence.
  • The Vedas and the Upaniṣads. Sound and silence, the chariot of the senses, and neti neti as self-inquiry.
  • The Yoga Sūtra of Patañjali. Watching the fluctuations of the mind, the eight limbs on the mat, and turning a harmful thought around.
  • The subtle bodies. The guṇas, the five kośas, prāṇa, nāḍīs, bandhas and cakras, taught with care.
  • Modern yoga. Colonialism, nationalism and physical culture, Krishnamacharya and his students, appropriation, and power and abuse in yoga communities.
  • The ethics of yoga. The yamas and niyamas, ahiṃsā across Jain, Buddhist and yogic traditions, and what happens when the yamas conflict.
  • Teaching ethically. Scope of practice, consent and touch, trauma-informed teaching, and equity and access.

You will not be asked to memorise one “correct” history. You will learn to read sources critically, to hold more than one story at once, and to bring all of this into your teaching with respect and honesty.

Questions to carry with you

You don’t need to wait for November to begin. Take one of these into your next practice, or your next class:

  1. Where did you first learn the story of yoga, and who told it to you?
  2. What do you say when a student asks how old yoga is?
  3. When you rest in stillness, who is noticing the stillness?
  4. Which of the yamas is easiest for you to keep on the mat, and hardest to keep off it?
  5. Who is missing from the room where you practise? Why?

I don’t have final answers to these. That is exactly why I want to explore them with you, in a room, together.

The details
   

Module

Module 2 · Yoga Philosophy, History & Ethics

Contact weekends

7–8, 14–15 and 28–29 November 2026

Self-study weekend

21–22 November 2026

Times

Saturdays 13:00–20:00 · Sundays 9:00–16:00

Hours

50 h, open as a single module or as part of the 200h, 300h or 500h Modular YTT; Yoga Alliance continuing education credit
   
   

Read the full curriculum on the Module 2 page, or write to us to join. I’d love to hear which of these questions stays with you.

Sources and further reading