Aṣṭāṅga Yoga is a distinctive approach to the physical, postural component of Yoga that appears to have been developed by Shri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya when he taught at the Palace School in Mysore, India in the first half of the twentieth century.1 Postures are held for a relatively brief time, usually five breaths, and are often linked to one another by a sequence of movements popularly known as vinyāsa.
To the eye of an observer, this Yoga is distinguished by its vigorous, almost gymnastic, character, and by the fact that practitioners learn a series of postures by heart and perform them regularly. Internally, however—i.e., from the point of view of the practitioner herself—the practice is built upon attending to certain natural connections between movement and breath, further articulating these connections, and ultimately harnessing the breath—expressing it outwardly, as it were—in the taking of postures and in transitions between them.
As the practitioner becomes familiar with the postures, the mind is released from planning or worrying about “what comes next” and becomes serene and one-pointed, especially in its focus on the flow of breath. The cycle of posture-vinyāsa-posture that procedes from the down/up cycle of the breath in the core of the body makes the practice into a kind of dance: a dance around a Still Point that shines more and more in awareness—indeed, shines as Awareness Itself.
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
— T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
The Sanskrit term aṣṭāṅga, a compound formed from aṣṭa, “eight”, and aṅga, “limb”, means “eight-limbed”, and it refers to an eight-fold classification of yogic practices enunciated in the Yoga Sūtras, a classic systematization of Yoga ascribed to the sage Patanjali and dating from approximately 200CE. (Āsana, “posture” is just one of these eight practices.) Strictly speaking, the term “Aṣṭāṅga Yoga” refers not to the specific āsana practice developed by Krishnamacharya, but to entire system of Yoga described in the Yoga Sūtras. However, Krishnamacharya was highly interested in the Yoga Sūtras, which had come into renewed popularity in early twentieth-century India, so he and his students were keen to associate his approach with that system. Indeed Krishnamacharya’s student Patabhi Jois told early Western students that he was teaching them “the Yoga of Patanjali”, and so the approach came into the West as “Aṣṭāṅga Yoga”. In order to distinguish it from Patanjali’s system, which knows nothing of such a variety of elaborate postures or their connecting vinyāsa, Krishnamacharya’s yoga from his Mysore days is sometimes called “Aṣṭāṅga Vinyāsa Yoga”. ↩︎