Yoga and the West

The Samskrit symbol OM

     I was reading an article by Carl Jung entitled Yoga and the West in which he looked at reasons for popularity of Yoga in the west and above all, the fundamental difference in the western and eastern approach to Yoga due to differences in mentalities and spiritual traditions in the West and the East. His final verdict is, ''The spiritual development of the West has been along entirely different lines from that of the East and has therefore produced conditions which are the most unfavourable soil one can think of for the application of yoga.'' He uses pranayama (breathing exercies within yoga system) as an example. The sanskrit word 'prana' means a lot more than mere breath to a true yogi, and he does not know it with his understanding, but with his heart, belly, and blood. The Eurpen , on the other hand, 'only imitates and learns ideas by rote'.

I personally cannot agree more with Jung on such an observation on the subject of Yoga. I myself was teaching Yoga in this country after spending time in south India doing a Yoga teacher training course and spending years polishing up my own practice (what I mean is I treat yoga as an on-going thing instead of something to work on to gain qualifications). It amazes me to observe how yoga, which is meant to be an art of introversion with the aim of bringing unity and wholness to the person practicing it, has created competition, jealousy, division and conflict once implanted in the soil of the West. There's been a great deal of different schools, styles, sects and organisations grown up within the community of Yoga in this country; that in inself does not have to be a bad thing. But these different schools seem to be terribly jealous or even angry with each other, each seeing themselves as better than the others and therefore vying for authority or leadership in the propogation of yoga. I can see nothing but greed for power and money in their motive to do so. If their main concern in teaching yoga were the physical and spiritual well-beings of the individuals, any form of competition should never have arizen in the first place.
I remember when I first started my attempt of setting myself up as a yoga teacher in this country, my enthusiasm and sincerity was met by contempt or even hostility by colleagues from other schools. I was given numbers to ring for seeking advice, someone who holds a rather high-up position within an 'authorative' Yoga organization in this country. After hearing that I studies Yoga with a rather 'minor' or 'inferior' school of Yoga, she said with almost an audible sniff, ''your training practically amounts to NOTHING'', and 'in order to gain any qualifications to start teaching in this country, you need to start from bottom with us'. I was, needless to say, rather taken aback by this professional yoga person's superiority and arrogance. If her ladyship yogini had studied yoga as a complete system of philosophy, spiritual and physical discipline, she should have learned that the 'eight limbs' of yoga system requires the aspirant to be humble before anything else, and the word Yoga in itself means 'union' in sanskrit.
Yoga asanas (the physical postures) are only part of the whole in the complet yoga system, anyway. It is practiced in preparation for the work of pranayama and meditation. In other words, it is not an end on its own but means to the end. In Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, the opening sentence is ''Yoga is cessation of mind''. This, to me, makes perfect sense for it is the human mind that's riddled with conditioning, ideas, prejudices, judgements that blocks its own clarity. If one can dissolves the mind through the practice of Yoga (I don't mean just the asanas), then there will be no more division and fragmentation but union and completeness.