Is Exercise Yoga? Is Yoga Exercise?
These days in yoga there is a trend of shelving or altogether eliminating the energetic foundations of the postures and exploring them through the lens of movement or exercise science. This has been a valuable contribution to the world of yoga and movement, especially considering how popular and ubiquitous the yoga practice has become globally, but it does tend to pull the whole foundation and purpose of physical body postures (asanas) away from their source and into a new category that might be called “asana influenced exercise.”
How do we use this newfound appreciation for movement theory to the deep benefit of the core yoga practice, which is one that aims to awaken our subtle and energetic body and flow the divine within to the universal divine? I propose that Movement Science can be a form of Dharana, or focused absorption that births and supports meditation.
To be clear, asana was developed solely for the purpose of aligning the subtle or energetic body with the divine force within each and every one of us, called by the female name of Kundalini.
Kundalini (sometimes called Shakti or Maya) is both an external deity, a goddess of divine inner recognition and life current, as well as the subtle energy life-force within ourselves that tethers us to the universal spirit and that, upon awakening, drives each of us in our spiritual journey- no matter the religious title, description, type, or texture of that devotion.
If exercise science is universal and applicable to every body then so too is kundalini science, or that spark of life which connects us to our own perception of God through contemplation, prayer, reverence, body, or practice. But are these two efforts mutually exclusive or can each assist the other for the purpose of deep self-inquiry?
The subtle body and the physical body are interconnected and bound through breath, electric and energetic current, and inner alignment. In other words, the body is the classroom where our physical and our divine meet, play, and fall in love with one another.
The yoga system itself acknowledges the deep link between physical body and energetic body, describing the physical form as the outer sheath or form that is supported and held by the energetic body sheaths, of which there are three, just below it. These represent the subtle flow of energy, thought, intelligence, and intuition that flow upwards and into the physical body, giving us inspiration, consciousness, and our complex human sensitivity.
The inner tools of subtle body have many names depending on the tradition that inspires you most- from the meridians of Traditional Chinese Medicine to The Holy Spirit of Christianity, the Tree of Life from mystical Judaism, and the subtle and core Nadis and Pranavayus of the Yoga and Kundalini Science systems. This list could of course go on to encompass most other human religious practice because, as mentioned above, the body is the place where we must explore these topics and this is a great equalizer on the self-inquiry path because we each have a body.
In the physical body model we use the tool of proprioception to discover where we are in space. Proprioception is an inner focusing, an alignment with the fascia, the nervous system, and the subtler pulsations of life in our muscles, bones, fluids, and breath.
Exercise science that is given a yoga platform that includes spaciousness and contemplation will always increase our proprioception, and will do so exquisitely.
But we must not stop at cultivating proprioception in the physical body. This is where “asana influenced exercise” can alchemize into “yogasana” in a traditional sense. One of the most highly valued practices in the yoga system (refer to the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra and to the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali) is called Dharana, or single pointed focus. Dharana means “to hold, to possess,” and it is the step that leads to meditation, or Dhyana, which may be called the complete and spontaneous absorption in the object of Dharana (from Kundalini Vidya by Joan Harrigan). Yoga tradition maintains that one does not practice meditation, or dhyana, because it is the natural flowering of dharana, which is the disciplined practice cultivating that state.
It’s easy to see the link between proprioception and dharana. In the same way that a square is one form of a quadrilateral, or a rectangle, but a rectangle might also take any vast number of other four sided forms, proprioception is one path of dharana, but dharana might also take an innumerable variation of pathways to draw attention inward. In this way dharana and proprioception might even be called one, but only if that one practice intentionally focuses us and holds that focus steady.
Thus, if we are to use movement science to deepen our practice of yoga, then it must be a committed practice. We must know that proprioception is a form of dharana. Our movements must hold or possess our attention on that internal alignment and become a reverential act.
Once we do this we have bridged modern yoga to traditional yoga and we have captured the best that both have to offer- a deep recognition of the beauty of this body and its divine nature. Once dharana becomes dhyana, once focus becomes meditation, then kundalini Shakti can follow her path and we might blossom in ways surprising and gorgeously transcendental.
This is the possibility that yoga yearns toward, that yoga promises, and that modern science can help to support if we are committed, focused, and curious. Movement science is a lovely starting point for the yoga practice if we stay open, stay bold, and keep that focus strong.