Since Swami Vivekananda introduced yoga at the World's Parliament of Religions in 1893, yoga has gathered traction here. I don't know what it was about the 1990s but it was about then that yoga became a household name and we began seeing yoga studios sprouting like mushrooms around the globe and examples of it showing up in the mainstream — like the ads for yoghurt where everyone was yumming on yoga mats instead of auming. It went from fringe to trendy.
To some extent the knock on effect of the yoga explosion watered it down from being a rigorous path of self-inquiry and liberation to yet another popular distraction, however, even a superficial approach done regularly enough began sewing its seeds into the collective. Seeds of greater connection and embodiment leading to a greater sense of connection to life, seeds of reverence for body, breath and mind, seeds of internal quiet gently rippling out and having an impact on personal relationships, business culture, family dynamics and more, seeds that disrupt our current world view leading to a broader perspective, seeds of humilty as we realise just how much we really don't know and can't know through the lens of cognition.
Fast forward to today and there is a genuine bi-focation showing up in the culture. Those acting like beacons of embodied inner quiet and resilience and those caught in the chaos of reactivity where the monkey mind and all of the influences acting on it, drags people from one drama to the next.
Perhaps this ratio of awareness verses ignorance has always been and there are just way more humans on the planet now. In the famous yoga treatise the Bhagavad Gita there are 5 pandavas who represent the brothers of righteousness, who are aware and who act with clarity and a sense of service to the whole. They are pitched in battle against 100 kauravas who represent those in a state of reactive ignorance where vices such as greed, vanity and envy dominate and inform their behaviour. A ratio of 5-100. This reminds me of the structure of an atom — a single proton acting as centripetal force unifying matter that is surrounded by a sea of reactive electrons. Perhaps this is balance.
Yoga is built on the foundation of ahimsa. This principle described in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali translates as non-inqury or non-harm and infers that your being should not be negatively impacting the collective. A bit like 'first do no harm' — the hippocratic oath of modern medicine that seems to have been thrown out the window with the growing influence of Big Pharma.
Another central theme of yoga is union or unity. This state of unity or oneness is viewed as our underlying true nature. Our self-identification as 'me', 'I' is a filter that gives us the illusion of separation. The goal of yoga is to dissolve this veil of illusion and realise our unity. Yoga practice peels back the layers of distortion and separation which it describes as avidya, 'wrong view', essentially ignorance. As we migrate towards this unity we learn that we are connected to everything. When this becomes our lived experience we can no longer harm that which we are. We become increasingly more mindful of our offering to the collective.