The Evolution of Yoga:

by Kaitlin Faye Heavin

There is something quietly radical happening every morning across the world that most people don’t even notice. Millions of people, most of them women, roll out a yoga mat. They stretch. They breathe. They sit in stillness. It might be the only time out of their day to really experience themselves. They do it in gyms, cramped apartments, trauma recovery clinics, and corporate offices between meetings. The strangest part, and what most of them probably do not know, is that the tradition they are showing up for was, for most of its recorded history, never meant for them at all.

Yoga is one of the oldest surviving philosophical and spiritual systems in the world. Its written roots stretch back more than two thousand years, and its oral traditions goes back even further. Over that time it has been debated, codified, adapted, fought over, commodified, and reclaimed. It has belonged to wandering ascetics, to royal courts, to colonial reformers, to Hollywood, and now to millions of ordinary people seeking relief from the weight of modern life. Understanding why yoga has endured and why its evolution genuinely matters requires taking both things seriously: the ancient foundations that gave it form and the cultural forces that have shaped it ever since.

At its core, yoga was never really about stretching. It’s a technology of transformation and an attempt to answer life’s deepest questions. What is the nature of the mind, really? How do we free ourselves from suffering? What is the relationship between the individual self and something larger? These are not small questions, and the early thinkers who shaped yoga were not chasing flexibility. They were systematic, rigorous, and for their time and place, remarkably sophisticated. They were trying to understand consciousness itself.

But those thinkers were also products of their world. The world they inhabited was one in which women’s spiritual lives were largely treated as secondary, derivative, or simply beside the point. To understand yoga’s evolution is to understand how a tradition has wrestled with its own exclusions and why that wrestling matters as much today as it ever has.

Before yoga existed as a practice, there was Samkhya as a philosophy. Samkhya is one of the six orthodox schools of Hindu thought and is widely considered yoga’s intellectual parent. Its main contribution was a framework for understanding all of reality. These two fundamental realities are Purusha, pure consciousness or the witnessing self, and Prakriti, nature and matter, everything that moves and changes. Human suffering, in the Samkhya view, gets confused between the two. We think we are Prakriti but in reality, we are Purusha. We tend to mistake our thoughts, life stressors, and emotions for who we inherently are. Once that happens, we’re stuck in it.

The Samkhya philosopher Ishvarakrishna, writing in the Samkhyakarika around the 4th or 5th century CE, described pure consciousness this way: “Purusha is witness, isolated, indifferent, a mere looker-on, and inactive.” What sounds at first like a cold description is actually pointing at something liberating. The deepest part of awareness is not touched by what passes through it. The problem is that we forget this entirely. We identify completely with our anxieties, narratives, emotional fluctuations, and we suffer accordingly. True liberation is understanding that YOU are not the chaos in your head, but you are the one witnessing it. The goal is not to escape your life, it’s more about just being able to see it clearly and then navigate from there. The shift is subtle, and with practice, it changes everything.

The liberation yoga promises is the recovery of that distinction, the moment when the witnessing self stops drowning in what it is watching.

It is worth taking a moment to pause on something that is pretty important to yoga’s history. In the Samkhya framework, and at the level of ultimate reality, the idea is completely neutral because pure consciousness has no gender. Yet here we are, centuries later, making the case for women because philosophical equality never translated into actual practice. And century upon century shows us that the bodies presumed to be doing the work were almost exclusively male.

If Samkhya gave yoga its philosophical skeleton, Patanjali gave it its most enduring map. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, composed somewhere between 400 BCE and 400 CE, is a collection of 196 short, densely packed aphorisms laying out a complete system of practice. Scholars still debate the exact date, but nobody debates the influence. This text remains the single most referenced classical source in yoga philosophy today.

Patanjali opens with a line that has been translated and argued over ever since: “Yogas chitta vritti nirodhah” (Yoga Sutras 1.2), yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind. Not strength, not flexibility, not even “peace” exactly, but the quieting of the mental movement that keeps us from perceiving things clearly. The very next line gives the payoff: “Tada drashtuh svarupe avasthanam” (Yoga Sutras 1.3), then the seer abides in its own nature. When the noise stops, what remains is pure awareness, undistorted, and at home within itself.

The system Patanjali lays out to get there is the famous eight-limbed path: ethical guidelines (yamas and niyamas), posture (asana), breathwork (pranayama), drawing the senses inward (pratyahara), concentration (dharana), meditation (dhyana), and finally absorption (samadhi). What strikes most people when they encounter this is how little of it is physical. Asana, the part of yoga that modern practice has made almost synonymous with the whole tradition, is one limb out of eight. And Patanjali’s description of it is almost startlingly brief: “Sthira sukham asanam” (Yoga Sutras 2.46), posture should be steady and comfortable. That is the entire instruction. Now compare that to modern yoga today, where entire classes are centered around movement, precision, alignment, asana. Somewhere along the way, that emphasis drifted. Most of us do not have the ability to be still.

For Patanjali, the actual obstacles are internal: ignorance (avidya), ego (asmita), craving (raga), aversion (dvesha), and clinging to life (abhinivesha). These are the kleshas, and he frames them as universal features of human experience. Gender is nowhere on his list of obstacles. The tradition that followed him, however, quietly added it anyway.

The Gheranda Samhita, a 17th-century Hatha yoga text, takes a slightly different approach than its predecessors. It calls itself a manual of ghatastha yoga, literally vessel yoga, built on the understanding that the body and mind are containers carrying the soul, and the work of practice is making those containers clean, strong, and steady enough to hold what they are meant to hold.

Its opening philosophical statement gets directly to the point: “There is no fetter like illusion, no force greater than yoga, no friend greater than knowledge, and no enemy greater than ego” (Gheranda Samhita 1.4, trans. Srisa Chandra Vasu). In one sentence it names the problem, the tool, and the two things that determine whether the tool works. The seven-limbed system that follows, moving through purification, posture, breath, energy work, sense withdrawal, meditation, and samadhi, is all in service of loosening those “fetters.”

What makes this framing so significant for yoga’s evolution is its insistence on the body as the vehicle of liberation. If the body is the vehicle, then the question of which bodies are considered worthy becomes a serious theological question, not just a social one. And for most of yoga’s classical history, the answer was quietly assumed to be male bodies. The Gheranda Samhita, like the texts around it, is structured as a male teacher passing knowledge to a male student. Its vessel yoga philosophy is universal in aspiration but narrow in its imagined audience.

The Hatha Yoga Pradipika, composed by Swatmarama in the 15th century CE, is one of the three foundational classical texts of Hatha yoga and probably the most detailed early account of the physical practice. The postures, breath techniques, internal locks (bandhas), and purification methods that run through modern yoga trace a large chunk of their lineage back to this text directly.

It is written almost entirely for men. The ideal practitioner is a renunciant yogi who has abandoned household life and social obligations to dedicate himself completely to the path of liberation. Women appear in the text primarily as a caution. They are mentioned alongside warnings about eating meat (ahimsa: nonviolence/nonharming) and excessive travel, and the concern is not incidental to the tradition, but structural. Classical Hatha yoga understood the male body’s spiritual energy as concentrated in semen, and its preservation through celibacy (brahmacharya) as essential to genuine practice. Women, within this framework, were a threat to that project.

This was not simply a cultural prejudice layered over an otherwise neutral practice. This was truly woven into the architecture of the teaching itself. The practices, the anatomical assumptions, the goals of the work, all of it was built around the male body as the standard. Women’s bodies were not merely overlooked and only visible in these texts as a danger to the men doing the “work.”

The Bhagavad Gita, part of the ancient Mahabharata epic and composed roughly between the 5th and 2nd centuries BCE, offers the most expansive vision of yoga in the entire classical literature. It is a conversation between the god Krishna and the warrior Arjuna, set on the eve of a devastating battle. Arjuna is paralyzed by doubt and moral anguish, and Krishna’s response becomes one of the most influential spiritual teachings in human history, laying out three paths of yoga: the yoga of action (karma yoga), the yoga of knowledge (jnana yoga), and the yoga of devotion (bhakti yoga).

The Gita is notably more open than most classical yoga texts in its vision of who can practice. In Chapter 9, Krishna states that even those considered of lowly birth, including women, Vaishyas, and Shudras, can take refuge in him and reach the highest goal (Bhagavad Gita 9.32). On the surface this reads as generous and inclusive, and in many ways it was, relative to its context. But the structure of the statement is revealing. Women are grouped alongside low-caste men as a special category requiring divine accommodation, rather than simply being included as a matter of course. The assumption underneath the inclusion is still that women need extra dispensation to access what men receive by default just for being born male.

And yet the Gita carries something that cuts underneath that social limitation. Its description of the ideal practitioner in Chapter 12 is entirely about inner qualities: someone not given to resentment, kind toward all beings, free from false ego, holding steady in both joy and difficulty, and moving forward with unwavering commitment (Bhagavad Gita 12.13-14). Nothing in that description belongs to one gender or one kind of body. It describes a quality of being that anyone can cultivate, in any life, and at any time.

The Gita’s definition of yoga as evenness of mind, samatvam yoga uchyate (Bhagavad Gita 2.48), might be its most enduring gift to modern practitioners. The capacity to stay grounded when everything around you is pulling in different directions is not a luxury spiritual achievement. For most people navigating contemporary life, it is actually something closer to a survival skill.

The wall keeping women out of formal yoga practice was real, but it was never completely solid. There were always women who found a way through, usually by force of extraordinary spirit and at considerable personal cost.

The bhakti devotional movement, which swept across South Asia from roughly the 7th through 17th centuries, created the most significant opening. Devotional love, in the bhakti framework, required no institutional access, no Sanskrit literacy, and no teacher’s permission. It required a heart capable of profound longing. That particular requirement did not discriminate.

Mirabai, the 16th-century Rajput princess turned wandering poet-saint, is the most celebrated example of a woman who seized that opening completely. She walked away from her royal marriage, her caste obligations, and every social expectation her world held for her, and she spent her life in devotion to Krishna and in the company of other seekers. The consequences were real: her in-laws tried to poison her, her family applied enormous pressure to bring her back into line, and she kept going anyway. In one of her most beloved poems she wrote, “I have felt the swaying of the elephant’s shoulders; and now you want me to climb on a jackass?” (trans. Robert Bly). She knew what she had experienced, and she was not willing to give it up for respectability. It should be noted that Mirabai’s poems have traveled through many manuscript traditions and translations, so specific lines can vary by source. 

The Robert Bly translations, published in Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems (Beacon Press, 2004), are among the most widely read in English and are the source used here.

Lalleshwari, a 14th-century Kashmiri mystic known as Lal Ded, left behind poetry that reads like an account of genuine interior practice rather than an inherited doctrine. She wrote: “I, Lalla, entered the gate of the garden of my own mind. There I found Shiva united with Shakti.” She was describing breathwork, concentration, the cultivation of inner heat and awareness, in the language of lived experience. These women were remarkable. They were also not evidence that the system was working the way it claimed. They were evidence of what it cost to practice in spite of the system.

There is a layer of yoga’s history that most people experience without naming it, and that is the dimension around the yoga body or aesthetic. What yoga looks like in images, which bodies are photographed, which practitioners get held up as examples, all of this shapes who feels like they belong in the space before a single word is even spoken.

Classical yoga texts had absolutely no interest in aesthetics in the modern sense. The postures in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika and Gheranda Samhita were not designed to look beautiful. They were designed to work: to open the hips for long meditation sits, to build internal heat (tapas), to regulate the nervous system for sustained breathwork. The classical ideal of the yogic body was described in terms of lightness (laghima), steadiness, clear eyes, and freedom from disease, qualities that are byproducts of practice, not a visual standard or performance.

The idealization of the yoga body as something to look at is entirely modern, and it arrived with yoga’s migration to the West. By the time yoga reached mainstream American culture, it was already embedded inside a fitness and wellness industry with very specific ideas about which bodies were worth it. Were they worth putting in front of a camera? Were they worth being front and center in a class or on a stage? And who makes those decisions? The result is familiar to anyone who has looked at a yoga app or walked past a studio window: lean, young, flexible, predominantly white and female. That image is not a reflection of what classical practice looked like or asked for. It is a reflection of what the wellness market decided to sell.

The exclusion this creates is quiet but effective. Nobody has to tell a larger body, an aging body, a disabled body, or a body marked by trauma that it is not welcome. Those bodies simply never appear because they were never welcomed in the first place based on the silent message they’ve constantly received. Nobody had to say anything out loud.

Here is something that deserves far more conversation in yoga spaces, particularly given who fills those spaces now: the physical vocabulary of modern yoga was developed, codified, and taught primarily by men working in the early 20th century. Krishnamacharya, his student B.K.S. Iyengar, and Pattabhi Jois are the most influential architects of modern postural yoga, and all three were men. Their bodies, their anatomical proportions, and their ranges of motion shaped the alignment standards that got passed down through generations of teacher training programs. The male body became the unspoken template.

This matters practically, because female and male bodies are genuinely different in ways that directly affect how postures work. The female pelvis is shaped differently than the male pelvis, with a wider subpubic angle and a differently positioned hip socket. These differences have real consequences for poses like lotus (padmasana), bound angle (baddha konasana), and any posture requiring deep hip flexion. A woman working toward alignment cues that were designed around male anatomy may be working against her own structure, leading to strain, frustration, or the quiet conclusion that her body is simply not made for yoga, when the actual problem is that the standard was never set for her in the first place.

What makes this particularly interesting is who tends to guard those traditional standards today. The majority of yoga studio owners in the United States are women. Many were trained in lineages tracing directly back to those mid-century male teachers, and many teach with genuine depth and devotion. There is nothing wrong with honoring a lineage. But it is worth sitting with the irony of women carefully preserving the precise form of a tradition that, at its classical roots, considered them unfit to practice it.

Functional movement asks a genuinely different question. Instead of asking whether a pose looks the way it is supposed to look, it asks what the pose is trying to accomplish, and then asks how this particular body gets there. Triangle pose (trikonasana) achieves its goals of hip stability, lateral stretch, and core engagement differently in different bodies. One person gets there with a long stance and a hand to the floor. Another gets there with a shorter stance and a block or hand on the shin. Neither is a compromise or a lesser version of the pose. Both are doing the work. Both are yoga.

Patanjali already said as much. Posture should be steady and comfortable, he wrote, not impressive, not uniform, not identical across every body in the room. A pose that creates pain or compression in service of visual form has drifted away from what the tradition actually called for. The growth of trauma-informed yoga, adaptive yoga, and body-inclusive teaching is sometimes framed as a softening or a departure from the tradition’s roots. It’s not. A more honest reading is that these approaches are the closest modern yoga has come to what the classical texts were actually after: a body at ease and available for deeper work.

The story of how yoga shifted from an exclusively male practice to one now practiced by somewhere between 70 and 80 percent women in the United States is one of the stranger reversals in the history of any spiritual tradition.

When yoga first traveled to the West, it came through male Indian teachers addressing primarily male Western audiences. Swami Vivekananda’s famous 1893 address at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago introduced Vedantic philosophy to Western audiences who had never encountered it, but the serious spiritual seeker he imagined was, in his cultural context, male. That assumption traveled west with the teachings.

The shift began to crack open with the postwar era. Indra Devi, born Eugenie Peterson in Latvia in 1899 and later a student of Krishnamacharya in Mysore, became yoga’s first significant female teacher in the West, and she had to fight for it. When she approached Krishnamacharya asking to study with him, he initially turned her away. Yoga was not appropriate for women, he said. She kept returning. He eventually relented, and she became one of his most accomplished students, going on to teach in Hollywood, Argentina, Shanghai, and eventually in Mexico well into her hundreds. She did not slip through a crack in the wall. She wore the wall down and ran through it.

By the 1980s and 1990s, the demographics of Western yoga had flipped entirely. Women were not just practicing. They were building studios, writing the books, shaping the culture, and training the next generation of teachers. The tradition that once considered them an obstacle to male practitioners now had them holding the keys. Finally.

The Yoga Sutras are not diminished by being practiced in a strip mall studio. The Gita’s teaching on equanimity is not less true because the person sitting with it also has a full-time job and a phone full of notifications. The Gheranda Samhita’s insistence that the body is a vessel worth tending is, if anything, more radical now than it was in the 17th century, in a culture that has built entire industries around disconnecting people from their own physical experience.

What the classical texts understood, in their different ways, is that the mind’s tendency toward anxiety, craving, comparison, and reactivity is not a modern invention. It is a feature of human consciousness, and it has always been. Patanjali’s chitta vritti, the fluctuations of the mind, is what we would now recognize as the stress response, the inner critic, the anxious loop that will not shut off at 2am. The practices he described are what contemporary neuroscience would call tools for nervous system regulation and interoceptive awareness. They work. The research has grown substantial enough that yoga and mindfulness have moved from alternative health into mainstream clinical treatment for anxiety, trauma, depression, and chronic pain.

But, the evolution matters for a reason that goes beyond research citations. The history of women in yoga is ultimately a story about whose suffering was considered worth addressing. The anxiety, trauma, burnout, and grief that bring millions of women to the mat today are real. The tools they find there are real. The fact that those tools were built without women in mind, actively withheld from them for centuries, and are now widely available largely because certain women refused to accept that refusal, all of that is woven into what modern yoga is and why it keeps growing.

Yoga has lasted for thousands of years because it keeps addressing questions that human beings cannot stop asking. How do we live in bodies that hurt? How do we quiet minds that will not rest? How do we find stability in an ever shifting world? The classical texts took those questions seriously and offered serious, rigorous answers. What has changed is who gets access to those tools and that shift is what truly defines modern yoga.

The Bhagavad Gita teaches that it is better to walk your own path imperfectly than to walk someone else’s perfectly (Bhagavad Gita 3.35). That teaching speaks directly to what yoga is going through right now. A practice that actually serves a real person in a real body, in the genuine conditions of their life, is closer to what the tradition was always pointing toward than any perfectly executed pose in a perfectly curated studio.

Modern yoga is imperfect and sometimes commercially unrecognizable from its roots. It is also reaching people the original texts never imagined, offering real tools for healing to bodies and minds that classical tradition did not design for at the time, and doing so through teachers who were told for centuries that this tradition was never meant for them. Tradition is not being betrayed. This is what a living tradition actually looks like when it is still doing its job. Evolving.

References

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Mallinson, J., & Singleton, M. (2017). Roots of yoga. Penguin Classics.

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