Drishti – Santa Barbara Yoga Store: Yoga Clothing, Workout Clothes, & Yoga Supplies

Okay, we know that a can of worms may be opened with this one, but here we go anyway:

Who owns the rights to yoga? Clearly, yoga is a practice with deep origins in India.  But it is also a hugely popular multi-billion dollar industry in the West (especially in the U.S.)  Apparently, India has decided to take some serious action in response to the 2,580 (!) yoga-related patents, copyrights, and trademarks that have been filed in the U.S.  (Hello… Bikram?)  In order to take back ownership of what they feel to be their national legacy of yoga, India has given a team of 200 experts the task of assembling a complete catalog of yoga poses and ancient yogic texts.  This reference guide is called the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, and so far 600 yoga poses have been officially recorded in it, with about 1,000 to go.  By creating this detailed catalog, the Indian government hopes to put an end to Westerners staking legal (and profitable) ownership claims on yoga.   It’s unclear whether this bold move will give India the power to retroactively affect yoga-related patents already in existence, or whether it will only entitle them to deflect new patents from here on out.

Drishti opinion time: Yes, yoga has its origins in India, but the manner in which it’s practiced today in the West is a 95%-new incarnation that hasn’t existed for more than a generation or two.  T. Krishnamacharya, the highly-respected “grandfather” of Hatha Yoga who was the first person to teach a form of yoga that we would vaguely recognize today, lived from 1888 until 1989.  That’s right – he was alive in 1989, when airplanes, computers, and CDs were in full swing, when George Bush the first was in office, and when Saved By The Bell broadcasted into our living rooms on a daily basis.  In other words, yoga as we know it in the West is a modern invention.  Heck, the yoga mat, the #1 indispensible tool for anyone’s yoga practice, wasn’t even invented until the 1980’s or so…

Therefore, we get a little tired of hearing that ubiquitous, shaky claim that yoga is 5,000 years old.  As though what we do today on bright purple yoga mats in hardwood floor-lined rooms with blocks, straps, and blankets in tow is really anything close to what people in India did back in the year 3,000 BCE…  Yeah, right!

We can’t think of a more beneficial practice for your body, mind, or soul than yoga.  But it’s not because it’s ancient. It’s because it’s an intelligently-designed system for our modern world, and it was designed by one man in the early 1900’s.  Even Yoga Journal agrees:

You may never have heard of him, but Tirumalai Krishnamacharya influenced or perhaps even invented your yoga. Whether you practice the dynamic series of Pattabhi Jois, the refined alignments of B.K.S. Iyengar, the classical postures of Indra Devi, or the customized vinyasa of Viniyoga, your practice stems from one source: a five-foot, two-inch Brahmin born more than one hundred years ago in a small South Indian village.

To take us back to the original point of this post, we think that the whole debate about who should own the rights to yoga is silly.  We know that yoga is practiced by millions of people throughout the world, and we know that it has changed forms incredibly in recent years.  It’s therefore a collective, mutable practice that has neither a specific point of origin nor a single, static form. In essence, then, it’s owned by everyone who practices yoga, and it’s also owned by no one.  And it’s certainly not owned by Beverly Hills Bikram Choudhury or 200 cataloguing experts in India.

T. Krishnamacharya
(photo from Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram website)