What are Yoga Postures?
A yoga posture is usually called an asana, though sometimes it’s called a pitha. Both these Sanskrit words literally mean “seat”. Originally, many centuries ago, an asana was the “seat” or platform on which the yogi sat for meditation. “Having set in a clean place his firm seat (sthiram asanam), neither too high nor too low, covered with sacred grass, a deerskin, and a cloth, one over the other … let him [i.e. the yogi] practise yoga for the purification of the soul” (Bhagavad-Gita 6:11-12, translation by S. Radhakrishnan). Over time the word became associated with the physical position or “posture” itself assumed by the yogi, which is how we loosely define the word asana today. Nobody knows where the postures came from. Some scholars and teachers speculate that the earliest asanas were spontaneous, unstructured movements of yogis responding to powerful surges of divine energy in higher states of consciousness. These asanas flowed one to the next, like a sacred dance, and only over m
