And Why We Must Return to the Yoga of the Inner Body
When we look at what most people today call yoga, especially in the United States, we do not see yoga. We see gymnastics with Sanskrit names. Competitive flexibility. Rubber bodies. Endless selfies. Yoga as physical theatre. Yoga as spectacle. Yoga as ego. And if we trace this distortion to its root, we arrive not in ancient India but in a very specific time, place and man: B. K. S. Iyengar in the palace of Mysore under T. Krishnamacharya.
Iyengar himself explains in the interview transcript above that his first yoga was not meditation, not inner experience, not spiritual exploration. It was jumping. A “drill system,” “rigorous movements,” “like martial training,” his words. Why? Because he was teaching the royal household, all martial people. As he says openly:
“For martial people, meditation is not going to help them. Yoga had to become a martial art to train them… vigorous jumping movements from asana to asana.”
This is where the modern physical yoga craze began.
Not in ancient Himalayan caves. Not in Upanishadic mysticism. Not according to Patanjali.
But as a royal physical education program designed to create vanity, in Iyengar’s own word.
“Martial people don’t want philosophy, they want vanity… Jumping is the best method to create vanity.”
Let this sink in. Modern yoga, especially in the West, was born already ego-corrupted by performance. By display. By impressing others with the body. Iyengar admits this clearly. Later, due to injuries among practitioners and his own declining health, he slowed down and added alignment, props and precision, but the foundation had been laid: yoga as externalism.
And when yoga travelled to America, what travelled first was exactly that: Yoga as domination of the body. Yoga as hierarchy. Yoga as discipline of muscles. Yoga as athletic willpower. Yoga as self-improvement.
How this created the modern yoga illusion
What was lost in all this jumping and posing?
Inner perception was replaced with outer form
Being was replaced with doing
Presence was replaced with performance
Truth was replaced with technique
Transformation was replaced with flexibility
Most of the yoga world still lives under this spell. Studios worship range of motion instead of depth of perception. Teachers force alignment without understanding embodiment. Students push, sweat, compare, compete. And they call it yoga.
But authentic yoga is not about mastering the body. It is about dissolving the ego and awakening for our inner field of consciousness. This cannot be done by jumping from pose to pose while staring into a mirror. This demands a return to the inner body.
The forgotten third path: The Yoga of the Inner Body
Our work proposes something radically different: The Yoga of the Inner Body: a path of direct inner perception. It does not begin with the body as object, but with the body as living presence from within.
It is rooted in three levels of direct somatic awakening:
Level
Experience
Sensation
Fine inner vibrations and tingling begin
Flow
Subtle currents and somatic coherence awaken
Field
The entire body becomes a unified field of vibratory presence
No jumping. No external display. No performance. No ego.
Iyengar learned yoga by dominating the body. The Yoga of the Inner Body learns by listening to the body.
Iyengar yoga builds posture. Inner Body Yoga reveals presence.
Yoga is not a spectacle. Yoga is a return.
We must be honest: The Western yoga industry has gone in the wrong direction. It took Iyengar’s early martial-art yoga and turned it into a form of body worship, flexibility as identity. Teachers train students to push instead of perceive. To imitate instead of inquire. To seek approval instead of authenticity.
Iyengar himself eventually distanced from the early jumpings. He admitted injuries, he shifted toward alignment, but the damage was done, his style seeded the global idea that yoga = body control.
But real yoga is not control. Real yoga is participation in consciousness.
This is why The Yoga of the Inner Body must now emerge, not as another brand of yoga, but as a restoration of yoga as direct inner experience. We must return from display to discovery, from effort to intimacy, from ego to presence.
A new yoga for a new time
The future of yoga will not be decided by who bends the deepest, but by who listens the most deeply. It will not be about mastering hundreds of poses, but about entering the vibratory field of life within the body. It will not be a war against tension, but a release into being.
This is yoga, not as exercise, not as ideology, but as awakening.
And it begins not with jumping. It begins with silence. It begins with experiencing. It begins by dropping out of the mind. It begins with watching.
We will enfold more of this ancient form of Yoga in future articles.
breath4balance 