Women & Yoga

Today the majority of yoga practitioners are women. While fair access to downward dog might seem on the surface like a feminist victory, Noble and other feminist researchers tell a very different story. They ask – why are women still practicing a form of yoga developed by men – only for men? In fact, their research is uncovering evidence of an alternative, much more ancient female centered yoga practice that preceded the Hindi yogis by thousands of years.

Who knew?

Noble’s research into what she called the “female blood roots” of yoga suggests there was a widespread female-centered communal yoga practice dating from the upper Paleolithic and Neolithic. Celebrating the natural powers of “bleeding, birthing, healing and dying”, this early yoga was practiced in rituals of trance and dance.

In this way disease was believed to be purged from the community and fertility in women, animals, and food crops enhanced. Noble points to the images of female Buddha’s and high-ranking shaman priestesses which are so are pervasive in the artifacts and figurines of Old Europe (6000 BCE).

She proposes that the varied poses shown in these early sculptures, as well as frescoes, murals, and rock art through the ages, are expressions of an ancient shamanistic yoga eventually codified into the formal schools we know today.

Modern yoga is acknowledged to be largely derived from the Hatha tradition, but Hatha’s roots can be documented to reach further back to the female centered practices of Tantra Yoga.

Miranda Shaw is a historian on the female roots of Tantra Yoga. In her bookPassionate Enlightenment she describes the remains of round, open-air stone temples still found in India where animal-headed statues of dancing women, stand as a reminder of these yogini’s ecstatic rites.

Shaw writes how yogini’s gathered at feasts to play “cymbals, bells, and tambourines and danced within a halo of light and a cloud of incense.” Within this nocturnal congregation, “a circle of yoginis feasted, performed rituals, taught, and inspired one another”. They sang “songs of realization” regaling one another “with spontaneous songs of deep spiritual insight.”

The magical potency of Tantra was transmitted by a female line “power-holders” – a mysterious sect of women called the Vratyas – and they were not an isolated case.  Taoist Yoginis from China and Dakinis from Tibet were also powerful spiritual teachers, giving empowerments and initiations.

Monica Sjoo is another feminist historian whose books explore the legends of priestesses found in art, myths, and historical records. Sjoo claims that from the Pre-Neolithic through to at least the Bronze Age, across India, across the Silk Road to China, that women were performing ecstatic healing rituals for the benefit of their communities.

Sjoo claims that the concept of raising Kundalini energy,  fundamental to yoga philosophy and practice, originated with these yogic priestesses. They were the first to pull “the serpentine bio-mystical energies up the spine to achieve “wings” of illuminated consciousness”.

Both Sjoo and Noble argue that the concept of Kundalini originated in the female “Siddhis” (yogic powers) of menstruation, female sexuality, natural birth, and menopause. Noble believes these ancient yogic rites encouraged the free, spontaneous flow of kundalini energy through the female group, and by extension, throughout the entire community.

Did the idea of kundalini, recognized as central to yogic philosophy and development, originate with ancient yoginis? And if so, why do we know so little of their history today?

Noble, Shaw and Sjoo agree that with the advance of patriarchy, the ecstatic techniques

of women were gradually swallowed up by the more ascetic practices of men. In seated meditation, the transcendent was sought not through the body, but through the practices of mind.

Women and their biological functions came to be negatively equated with the life of the body and soon female rites were outlawed altogether. Yogini’s, dakini’s and shaman priestesses became “witches,” “ogresses,” “demonesses,” or “temple harlots”.

Over time we forgot there was once a different kind of yoga. One in which the inherent powers of the female body were celebrated and harnessed for illumination, freedom and compassion.

Noble believes yoga is a feminist issue because until we understand women’s central role in the development of yoga, it cannot be a truly effective female practice. Noble teaches what she calls Lunar Yoga, a yoga tuned to the ancient lunar calendar and the natural cycles of women. Here the focus is not on perfecting yogic postures but on experiencing energy “flow”. She urges women to reclaim the “natural, biological ways of accessing and experiencing the yogic power of our ancient fore-sisters”.

Noble writes although the idea of woman’s yoga ” might appear to glorify the female at the expense of the male, or capitulate to a worn-out 1950′s idea that “biology is destiny,” it actually does neither.” Instead it seeks to acknowledge the “dynamic quality of ecstasy that especially seems to mark the female-centered yoga experience.” It seems Noble’s call is being heard.......