I read recently this excellent book by MARK SINGLETON, here are some “resumé” of it:

This Article investigates the rise to prominence of as̄ ana (posture) in modern, transnational yoga. Today yoga is virtually synonymous in the West with the practice of as̄ ana, and postural yoga classes can be found in great number in virtually every city in the Western world, as well as, increasingly, in the Middle East, Asia, South and Central America, and Australasia. “Health club” types of yoga are even seeing renewed popularity among affluent urban populations in India. While exact practitioner statistics are hard to come by, it is clear that postural yoga is booming.1 Since the 1990s, yoga has become a multimillion dollar business, and high-profile legal battles have even been fought over who owns as̄ ana. Styles, sequences, and postures themselves have been franchised, copyrighted, and pat- ented by individuals, companies, and government,2 and yoga postures are used to sell a wide range of products, from mobile phones to yoghurt. In 2008, it was estimated that U.S. yoga practitioners were spending 5.7 billion dollars on yoga classes, vacation, and products per year (Yoga Journal 2008), a figure approximately equal to half the gross domestic product of Nepal (CIA 2008).

However, in spite of the immense popularity of postural yoga worldwide, there is little or no evidence that āsana (excepting certain seated postures of meditation) has ever been the primary aspect of any Indian yoga practice tradition—including the medieval, body-oriented haṭha yoga—in spite of the self- authenticating claims of many modern yoga schools (see chapter 1). The primacy of āsana performance in transnational yoga today is a new phenomenon that has no parallel in premodern times.

In the late 1800s, a mainly anglophone yoga revival began in India, and new syntheses of practical techniques and theory began to emerge, most notably with the teachings of Vivekananda (1863–1902). But even in these new forms the kind of āsana practice so visible today was missing. Indeed, āsana, as well as other techniques associated with haṭha yoga, were explicitly shunned as being unsuitable or distasteful by Vivekananda and many of those who followed his lead. As a result, they remained largely absent from initial expressions of practi- cal anglophone yoga.

In this study I set out to examine the reasons āsana was initially excluded from most modern yogas and what changes it underwent as it was assimilated into them.3 With such unpromising beginnings, how did āsana attain the standing it enjoys today as the foundation stone of transnational yoga? What were the conditions that contributed to its exclusion from the vision of early modern yoga teachers, and on what grounds was it able to make its return?

At the time of Vivekananda’s synthesis of yoga in the 1890s, postural practice was primarily associated with the yogin (or, more popularly, “yogi”). This term designated in particular the haṭha yogins of the Nāth lineage, but was employed more loosely to refer to a variety of ascetics, magicians, and street performers. Often confused with the Mohammedan “fakir,” the yogi came to symbolize all that was wrong in certain tributaries of the Hindu religion. The postural contortions of haṭha yoga were associated with backwardness and superstition, and many people considered them to have no place in the scientific and modern yoga enterprise. In the first half of this study I investigate the figure of the yogin as he appears in travel writing, scholarship, popular culture, and the literature of popular practical yoga, with a view to understanding the particular status of haṭha yoga at this time. This provides the necessary context for the second half of the study, which focuses on the particular modifications that haṭha yoga had to undergo to avoid being perceived as a blight on the Indian religious and social landscape.

The book targets an essential, but hitherto largely ignored, aspect of yoga’s development. Studies of modern yoga have tended to elide the passage from Vivekananda’s as̄ ana-free manifestos of yoga in the mid-1890s to the well-known posture-oriented forms that began to emerge in the 1920s. The two main studies in this area to date, by De Michelis (2004) and Alter (2004a), have focused on both these moments in the history of transnational yoga, but they have not offered a good explanation of why as̄ ana was initially excluded and the ways in which it was eventually reclaimed.4 The present work aims to identify the factors that ini- tially contributed to the shape that transnational yoga has taken today, and con- stitutes in some ways a “prehistory” of the international as̄ ana revolution that got into full swing with B. K. S. Iyengar and others from the 1950s onward.

That prehistory involves an examination of the international physical culture movement and the ways that it made an impact on the consciousness of Indian youth at the turn of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Quasi-religious forms of physical culture swept Europe during the nineteenth century and found their way to India, where they informed and infiltrated popular new interpretations of nationalist Hinduism. Experiments to define the particular nature of Indian physical culture led to the reinvention of āsana as the timeless expression of Hindu exercise.

Western physical culture–oriented āsana practices, developed in India, subsequently found their way (back) to the West, where they became identified and merged with forms of “esoteric gymnastics,” which had grown popular in Europe and America from the mid-nineteenth century (independent of any contact with yoga traditions). Posture-based yoga as we know it today is the result of a dialogical exchange between para-religious, modern body culture techniques developed in the West and the various discourses of “modern” Hindu yoga that emerged from the time of Vivekananda onward. Although it routinely appeals to the tradition of Indian haṭha yoga, contemporary posture- based yoga cannot really be considered a direct successor of this tradition.

That much for all the “Power Yoga” and other “Mysore style” or “Bikram” etc enthusiasts who in their immaturity Do pretend they are still doing traditional practice…
We can now reasonably assume they are merely gymnasts and not yogis in the traditional sense of the term. Our constant spiritual materialism need to be exposed and overcome and this is a god thing for a deeper understanding in the West of what yoga is and is NOT.
Those interested in the traditional approach of yoga, the body cult gymnastic oriented practice need definitely to be overcome into higher meditative quest which represent the heart of Traditionnal Yoga
I’m glad that this definition and origin of modern yoga that I was defending for years in the light of my research in India against often the “critics” within the yoga-teacher’s Familly (or supposed to be…) is now being demonstrated as True..