A Kinetic Exploration of Ashtanga Yoga Through the Lens of Pilgrimage

From its ancient beginnings to its present day incarnation, yoga (from here forth yoga), as a spiritual practice, has undergone seismic sea-change. From its first documented introduction in sacred Indian texts thousands of years ago, and its reincarnation from East to West some less than a century and a half ago, it has nevertheless retained, for some, a residual spiritual element. Those who practise a very contemporary variety of modern postural yoga known as Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga (Ashtanga), claim to have experienced, through their physical practice of yoga, a transformative, even transcendental/mystical awakening. To be open to fully understanding the mental and physical discipline which constitutes yoga as it is practiced today in Western society, it is important, says the author of A student's guide to the history and philosophy of yoga, to grasp the differences in "worldview that make it different from its Western counterparts [...]. The Indian understanding of time, of human destiny and of the kinds of connections which exist between language, the physical world and the various realms within the physical world are all different from what is generally accepted in the West" (2007, p.15). Connolly asserts that this is a "vast, almost mind-blowing, cosmology" (p.16). Practitioners of physical, or postural yoga, describe, as we will later witness through some very revealing firsthand accounts, feeling a suspension of time and a break with the physical world; given the employment of the physical body as a vehicle for the experience of transformation, there is an interesting paradox which surfaces in this practice. The inhabited body becomes the vehicle, and through embodied motion, movement, ritualized kinetics and the focus on an end goal, the body, which is the necessary component for the experience, in its control and surrender to the human effort and energy directing it, is ultimately transcended