Someone asked me after class last week – half-joking, half-genuinely curious – “why do you keep saying the Sanskrit names? Couldn’t you just say ‘downward dog’ and leave it at that?”
It’s a fair question and it got me thinking about why I do it.
The honest answer is that without those names, we’d basically be doing calisthenics. And there’s nothing wrong with calisthenics – but it’s not what we’re doing here. Yoga as a practice goes back thousands of years and using the Sanskrit names is a small way of keeping that connection alive – a reminder that this practice was born in a different country, in a different world, long before yoga mats and leggings existed.
The Earliest Roots
So where did it actually come from?
The earliest hints go back further than most people imagine – archaeologists have found seals from the Indus Valley, dating back over 4,000 years, showing figures seated in what look unmistakably like meditation postures. We don’t know exactly what those ancient people were doing, but it seems the seeds of something like yoga were already there, long before anyone wrote it down.
Patanjali and the Bigger Picture
Centuries later, a teacher called Patanjali brought a lot of that thinking together in a text called the Yoga Sutras. He described yoga as quietening the fluctuations of the mind – and laid out what’s known as the eight limbs of yoga, a kind of map for the whole practice. Asana – the postures we do – is just one of those eight limbs, and a fairly small part of the original picture. The bigger aim was always about the mind, not just the body.
The Rise of Hatha Yoga
It took several more centuries for the physical practice to really develop. Around the eleventh to fifteenth centuries, what we now call Hatha Yoga emerged – and this is where postures, breathwork and working with the body’s energy really came into their own. In a sense, this is the ancestor of the practice most of us recognise today.
Yoga’s Journey West
From there, yoga slowly made its way West – first through teachers sharing yoga’s philosophy and meditation in the late 1800s and early 1900s and then, throughout the twentieth century, through teachers who developed the postural styles that shaped the yoga most of us first encounter.
A Small Nod to a Long Tradition
So, when I say “Adho Mukha Svanasana” alongside “downward dog,” it’s a small nod to all of that – to the seals in the Indus Valley, to Patanjali’s eight limbs, to centuries of Hatha Yoga, and to the long journey this practice took to reach a Tuesday evening in Bebington.
I’m not precious about it and I’m certainly not testing anyone on their Sanskrit. But I think it matters to know, even loosely, that this practice travelled a long way to get here – and that when we step onto the mat, we’re joining something that started long before us, and will carry on long after.
If you’d like to go a little deeper, the Philosophy section explores the ideas behind yoga, while Practice and Poses offers a natural next step onto the mat.
If you’d like to try a class, I teach in Bebington and Hooton – you’d be very welcome to join us.
If you’d like a little more structure to guide you, Coming Home to the Body is a gentle course on alignment, awareness and ease – a good place to begin building your own practice.