If Not Physical Fitness, What Was Yoga Originally For?
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Millions of people practise yoga for stronger backs, greater flexibility, or relief from stress. These are genuine benefits. But they were never yoga’s original purpose.
The first yogis were not searching for physical fitness. They were searching for freedom.
More than two thousand years ago, Indian philosophers concluded that the root of human suffering lies not in the body but in the mind—or, more precisely, in our mistaken understanding of who we are. Yoga emerged as a practical method for overcoming that mistake.
The First Meaning of Yoga
One of the earliest surviving discussions of yoga appears in the Katha Upanishad, composed around the fourth century BCE. There, the brahmin boy Nachiketa rejects wealth, power, and a long life to ask Yama, the god of death, a single question: What becomes of us after death?
Yama replies that this knowledge cannot be gained through study alone, but only through yoga, which he defines as ‘the firm holding back of the senses’:
When the five organs of perception become still, together with the mind, and the intellect ceases to be active: that is called the highest state.
From the beginning, then, yoga was not a form of exercise but a discipline of inner stillness.
Why We Suffer
Classical yoga rests on Samkhya, one of the oldest schools of Indian philosophy. It seeks to explain both the nature of reality and the origins of human suffering.
According to Samkhya, reality consists of two fundamental principles. The first is Purusha, pure consciousness or the witnessing self. The second is Prakriti, which includes not only the physical world but also the body, the senses, the ego, and even the mind itself.
An ancient Indian image captures the idea beautifully. Two birds perch in the same tree. One pecks eagerly at the fruit, tasting now sweetness, now bitterness. The other simply watches. The first bird represents the self absorbed in the changing experiences of life; the second, the silent witness that remains untouched by them.
Yoga teaches that we mistake ourselves for the first bird when our true nature is the second. We identify with our thoughts, emotions, and fears, forgetting that these are passing experiences rather than our deepest identity.
Yoga Beyond Meditation
Composed in the centuries around the beginning of the Common Era, the Bhagavad Gita broadened the meaning of yoga. Alongside meditation, it described the yoga of knowledge (Jnana Yoga), selfless action (Karma Yoga), and loving devotion (Bhakti Yoga).
Its central message is that freedom comes not from withdrawing from life but from living without attachment to success or failure. Like Stoicism, the Bhagavad Gita teaches that peace of mind depends less on what happens to us than on how we meet it.
As the god Krishna tells the warrior Arjuna:
Work done for a reward is much lower than work done in the Yoga of wisdom.
Yoga was no longer confined to the forest or meditation hall. Everyday life itself could become a spiritual practice.
Patanjali’s Yoga
The philosopher Patanjali transformed these ideas into a practical discipline in the Yoga Sutra, the foundational text of classical yoga. He famously defined yoga as:
Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.
To achieve this, Patanjali described an eightfold path combining ethics, posture, breath control, concentration, and meditation, culminating in samadhi, complete absorption. Significantly, the physical postures (asanas) formed only one stage of this much larger discipline.
How Yoga Became Exercise
If yoga began as a path to liberation, how did it become associated with stretching and physical fitness?
The answer lies in its long evolution. Later traditions, especially Hatha Yoga, placed increasing emphasis on physical postures, though still in pursuit of spiritual liberation.
The decisive shift came in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Indian teachers such as Tirumalai Krishnamacharya presented yoga in dialogue with Western physical culture and modern medicine. Their students—including B. K. S. Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois—introduced these new forms of postural yoga to Europe and America, where they proved enormously popular.
Modern yoga is therefore not a misunderstanding of the tradition so much as one particular branch of it. While its philosophical roots remain ancient, its familiar image as a form of exercise is surprisingly modern.
The yoga practised by millions today is therefore only one chapter in a much older story.
The Original Purpose of Yoga
Millions of people come to yoga hoping for stronger backs, greater flexibility, or relief from stress. The first yogis hoped for something altogether more ambitious: freedom from suffering through a deeper understanding of the self.
Whether or not we accept their answers, the first yogis were asking one of humanity’s oldest and most profound questions:
Who am I?
For them, the search for that answer was the true purpose of yoga.
Continue Exploring
To learn more about yoga and the world that it unfolded from, see my book Indian Mythology and Philosophy.
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