Today, most people's understanding of yoga is that it is a physical discipline that brings good health and mental peace. There is even a lot of reearch being undertaken at some leading unversities in India and the West that is revealing the many physical and psychological benefits of yoga and meditation. In fact, it was after reading one such report in a newspaper that I got into the whole yoga craze myself, in a quest to rid myself of a troublesome pain in the spine. But the more I got involved in yoga and delved deeper into its many intricacies, the more obvious it became to me that yoga isn't an exercise form or medical cure. Yes, it does have many health benefits, but those are the perks of practicing yoga, not the essential goal of yoga.

It all started for me with Isha Kriya, an online guided meditation technique created by the Indian yogi and mystic Sadhguru. After completing the freely offered practice, which was quite short at only 15 minutes, I felt like a great weight had been lifted off me. It is hard to ay what this weight was, since I wasn't even aware of its existence until it ceased to exist! The next few days, I noticed that I was much more clear in my thought processes and many little emotional niggles that had been hounding me for many years had fallen off. My back pain was still there, but was considerably reduced, and what little was left didn't seem to affect me to the same extent.

I wasn't sure if this was just a case of mind over matter, or something that was happening on a more profound level. I had attempted to force myself into new habits earlier too, with just the sheer force of my will. But invariably, after a few months I would be back in the arms of those hated bad habits I had attempted to escape from. Or even worse, my new habits had taken on malignant forms and had turned into villains themselves. Would Isha Kriya be another flash in the pan, changing my attitudes for a few weeks, and then leave me back in the same old pit.

No, it wouldn't. I continued the practice twice a day for 40 days, as suggested in the video. At the end of 40 days, I was able to confidently state that many of my old bad habits and the sub-concious sabotaging I was carryingout on myself had evaporated. The change seemed to be permanent, functioning on a level deeper than body, mind or emotion.

It was only after this that I began to take a deeper interest not just in the practice of yoga, but also in the history and science of this practice. I attended a few more classes and learnt a new method. And I began to read up on where yoga actually comes from. Most books written by western scholars seem to go only as far as some seals from the Indus Valley Civilization 5000 years ago, with no proper consensus as to how yoga originated. But then I found a book by Sadhguru, where he spoke of Lord Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction, as the first yogi and the first guru who transmitted yoga to humanity. He dated this to around 15,000 years ago. A similar view was also put forward by Prabhat Sarkar, the founder of PROUT, who said that Shiva existed around 6000 years ago.

From there, Sadhguru says that Shiva transmitted yoga to Parvati and the seven sages known as the Saptarishis. Sarkar says Shiva taught yoga to Sati and his other followers, not specifying who they may be. Sadhguru says this "first yoga program" occurred at Kantisarovar, a lake about 5 kilometers beyond Kedarnath. Sarkar has nothing much to say about the location of this tranmission. Either way, I was most intrigued by these findings and have been conducting some research of my own through pubished papers and books. The farthest back into antiquity I have gone is about 11,000 years, in a site in Madhya Pradesh where archaeologists found a triangular shaped stone (with triangles inscribed within) representing a goddess in worship. This is very similar to goddess worship and the use of yantras in India today.