What is Yoga?

The word “yoga” denotes both the state of nonduality and the collection of practices from India that help us reach it. Unlike passive treatments such as massage or chiropractic care which are performed on you, yoga is an active practice you engage in, sometimes with guidance from a teacher, but ultimately a process of self-exposition. The term derives from Sanskrit, and the practices evolved over thousands of years across the Indus Valley and Himalaya. Teachings were transmitted orally, some eventually scribed, and preserved through family lineages and specific schools. Yoga’s essence is inseparable from these cultural origins, and there is a limit to how much it can be abstracted from its context and still remain yoga.

Once the gods appear within the contested realm of Being-and-non-Being or Being-in-non-Being, there is the struggle. Will the cosmos endure in its existence and evolve or will it drop into extinction, into the Death of non-Being out of which it arose? So at the outset we are brought face to face with the precarious existence of the cosmos, its foundational relativity. This struggle of Being to emerge into existence and endure against the forces constantly attempting to obliterate it, is the essence of cosmic Work, the foundation of work as struggle, the very mark of cosmic existence.

Debashish Banerji, Time Steps of the Cosmic Horse (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad)

This is the scale of yoga’s engagement, it is the most radically inclusive ontology available.

There is an ever-present nondual state, the fundamental substrate of consciousness from which the physical world emerges and within which it is contained.

Ordinary existence is often quite dualistic, allowing identity as something different from other things and other selves. Yoga allows an approach to the nondual state, in gradations, becoming less dualistic and more nondual. But nondual awareness is always there; it is not created by practice. Rather, practice dissolves the phenomena that obscure the source. We may believe we are manipulating the material world in order to feel better, but something more essential is occurring. Clouds are being cleared.

Three characteristics identify authentic yoga throughout this article:

• practice is oriented toward expanded awareness,
• traceable to Indic tradition,
• actively undertaken by the practitioner.

Transformation First

TThe practices of yoga produce well-documented health outcomes. Clinical evidence supports benefits across a range of physical, mental, and emotional conditions. Yoga often provides whole-person advantage in addition to addressing the symptoms initially presented. This evidence base has rightly earned yoga recognition within healthcare systems, including Australia’s private health scheme, where qualified teachers may now prescribe postures, breathing, and concentration techniques to enhance wellbeing.

These benefits are important, and are yet the result of something more fundamental. The heart of yoga is union, bridging, transformation. Where a therapy fixes something broken, yoga recognises the source awareness is always present. Practices dissolve obscuration to wellness rather than creating it from scratch. The tested and verified, yet secondary, health benefits of yoga need not become its definition. It is transformative, and because it is transformative, it is also therapeutic.

Traced to Source

Postures and techniques found in yoga sometimes appear in other systems, both ancient and modern. A forward fold in a gymnastics routine, a warrior-like stance in martial arts, or breathing techniques in other wellness traditions may share physical characteristics with yoga āsana or prāṇāyāma. Postures are often named after animals and people for good reason; within the consensus reality we call “physical,” movement patterns are universal. But yoga emerges from a deeper understanding of consciousness, liberation, body and mind.

This is why traceability to Indic and Vedic roots is so important. Calling something “yoga” when it lacks connection to that traditional context is a misrepresentation, and it has concrete consequences for insurance coverage, regulatory compliance, and professional liability. Equally, when practices that are easily traced to yogic tradition are rebranded to obscure that connection, the lineage is diminished and the individual’s relationship to it is severed.

Self-Directed Practice

Physical touch is integral to yoga teaching across traditions. Teachers use their hands to guide students into postures, deepen stretches, and correct alignment. Throughout, the student remains engaged in weight-bearing, breathing, responding to sensation, free to adjust or withdraw. The teacher serves the student’s process.

When a teacher guiding a student’s hips in uttānāsana is assisting an active practice, the relationship is clear. When a teacher places a student supine and manipulates their hip joint through a range of motion, they have crossed into bodywork performed on a passive recipient. Even when the physical actions look similar, the relationship is entirely different, and so is the professional framework that applies. Yoga is practised by someone. Treatments are performed on someone. These are different categories, and the word “yoga” in a product name bridges nothing. Dual qualifications allow a practitioner to offer both, each operating within its own professional framework.

Testing the Edge

Just Yin Case

Yin Yoga is easily recognised as yoga — postures held for five to ten minutes with stillness and sustained attention, leading toward the dissolution of resistance. It also offers a fascinating case study in how yoga absorbs and is presented through other frameworks. Books on the subject usually feature information on Traditional Chinese Medicine frameworks, including meridians, organic overlays, and energetic mappings. Teachers of Yin classes often (but not always) speak of such things too.

In any yoga class, one role of the teacher’s words is to give the analytical mind a legitimate task, something to hold and work with, so that the faculties beyond language can engage with what the practice is actually producing. In Yin Yoga, the TCM commentary may serve this purpose particularly well, offering students a framework more accessible or familiar than traditional yogic concepts and providing a meaningful entry point into deeper practice.

Meanwhile, beneath this overlay, the fundamental yogic transformation is occurring through the application of postures, the cultivation of stillness, and sustained attention. The underlying process of Yin Yoga (yoga postures, held for five to ten minutes with stillness and attention, leading toward the dissolution of resistance) is recognisably yoga. A yoga teacher may use TCM language without necessarily practising TCM.

Breathing Extracted

Classical prāṇāyāma techniques such as ujjāyī, nāḍī śodhana, kapālabhāti, and bhastrikā are well established within the yogic tradition, documented in foundational texts including the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, and taught as core components of yoga teacher training.

In recent decades, breathwork has emerged as a subcategory in the Western wellness landscape. Stanislav Grof’s holotropic breathwork and the Wim Hof Method both use sustained vigorous breathing to produce altered states of consciousness. These draw heavily from prāṇāyāma while presenting as distinct. As discussed in Blowing the Lid, these techniques can alter consciousness or trigger physical crisis, and adequate grounding in the tradition that developed them is crucial. Some studios offering breathwork workshops have publicly promoted footage of participants convulsing and weeping on the floor, presenting these responses as evidence of transformative experience.

If a practice is yoga, if it is prāṇāyāma, it should be named so. This raises the question of scope of practice and a framework for assessing the depth of connection between the yogic corpus and its derivatives. Bhastrikā, vigorous rhythmic bellows breathing, is classical prāṇāyāma. Its purpose is to move prāṇa, clear the nāḍīs, and prepare the practitioner for deeper states of awareness. A yoga teacher who modifies bhastrikā as part of their integrated yogic practice is working within a tradition that has always included such innovation and intensification. As Dr David Frawley notes in Yoga and Ayurveda, even mouth breathing, although typically avoided in common practice, appears in prāṇāyāma with specific effects on the subtle energy channels and the upward movement of life force.

The scope question in these cases is always whether the teacher is working within a yogic framework, drawing on yogic training, with yogic intention and understanding. A teacher who studied prāṇāyāma deeply and extends bhastrikā as part of an integrated practice is in a fundamentally different position from a teacher who completed a weekend breathwork certificate and offers sessions under that banner.

Implementation

Packaging services as yoga when they lack connection to the Sanskritic tradition is a manoeuvre with legal pitfalls. When a practice fails the criteria established across the preceding sections (traceability, active engagement, orientation toward expanded awareness) it is simply something other than yoga, whatever it may be branded. And activities that fall outside the definition of yoga likely fall outside insurance terms.

Yoga emerges from a tradition of liberation that cannot be separated from its origins. Yoga Australia’s scope of practice definitions exist to protect and strengthen yoga in a landscape that also appropriates and exploits, giving people the clarity to practise with confidence.