Interview with Accessible Yoga Part 1: Early History of Yoga for People with Disabilities

While taking an online course “An Introduction to the History and Philosophy of Yoga” with Seth Powell, I became very curious about the origins of yoga instruction for people who weren’t male and from an upper caste in India—the primary demographic we had studied. When, for example, did people with disabilities gain access to the teachings of yoga in India? What about women or other marginalized groups? Despite his busy schedule of teaching, writing a PhD dissertation, and having a family-life with children, Seth Powell agreed to an interview to shed some light on these questions.

Because the final interview was quite long, with detailed and fascinating answers to each question that I asked, I decided to divide it into separate posts, with one question and answer in each post in the series. Here's the first question I asked Seth:

 

 

Seth: First off, thanks for asking me to do this interview, Priya. That is an interesting question. I’m not sure what the earliest textual moment of this would be. To begin to approach this question though, I think it is important to build some historical context, as you know from my online courses, I love to do! From the outset, I think we should be cautious in looking to India’s past for obvious justifications for our contemporary social or political ideals and movements. I believe strongly that we should first try to understand Indian history and philosophy—including the early history of yoga—on its own terms. We may discover things do not always align so easily with our own modern concerns and views today, however, this hermeneutic of curiosity and openness can reveal very different ways of being human, in classical and medieval India.

So where do we begin? Most scholars today maintain that the origins of Indic yoga and meditation practices arose out of the confluence of Brahmanical and Śramaṇa (e.g., Buddhist and Jain) traditions, along the Gangetic plain in northern India, sometime around 2,500-3,000 years ago. I think we need to first ask, who were these early yogis? 

 

Broadly speaking, they were male ascetics—celibate, renunciates, on the fringes of early Indian civilization. But they were also “counter-culturalists,” in the sense that they were rejecting and reinterpreting the normative religious and social values and expectations placed upon them by the dominant Vedic society of the day. Many seem to have been Brahmin ritualists or warrior class-men (like the Buddha), who were leaving behind their families, jobs, identities, bank accounts, et al., in radical pursuit of what we now call “enlightenment.” They retreated from society into the forests, banded together in groups, and gathered at the feet of exalted gurus, where they exchanged ideas and practices aimed at eradicating human suffering, overcoming the limitations of the mind-body, in pursuit of great powers, and ultimately “release” (mokṣa) from worldly existence. Hardly the yoga and yogis we think of at the urban studio today.

 

In an early Śramaṇa context, the ascetic idea of bodily practice was to completely still the body, in order to no longer produce any karma, which keeps one bound in Samsāra (the cycle of life, death, and rebirth). What better way to cease the production of karma (lit. “action”) than by ceasing to move altogether? We have a famous image of the Jain ascetic Gomateśvara who stood still, stark naked in the forest, for so long that the creeper vines wound up his legs and body, engulfing him entirely as a part of the forest. Elsewhere I have suggested that the much later practice of Tree Pose (vṛkṣāsana), likely develops from this earlier ascetic notion, of “standing like a tree.” The Bhagavad Gītā is famously critical of such an approach, when Krishna tells Arjuna, never for a moment can one not engage in action. Even the renunciation of action is itself a form of action! Standing still like a tree, or sitting like a stone, is still standing and sitting, after all.