Competitive yoga is the performance of

asana An asana is a body posture, originally and still a general term for a sitting meditation pose,Verse 46, chapter II, "Patanjali Yoga sutras" by Swami Prabhavananda, published by the Sri Ramakrishna Math p. 111 and later extended in hatha yoga ...

s in sporting competitions. The activity is controversial as it appears to conflict with the nature of

yoga Yoga (; sa, योग, lit=yoke' or 'union ) is a group of physical, mental, and spiritual practices or disciplines which originated in ancient India and aim to control (yoke) and still the mind, recognizing a detached witness-consciou ...

History

The International Federation of Sports Yoga has organised annual championships since 1989, and is led by Fernando Estevez-Griego (Swami Maitreyananda). These competitions are not restricted to asanas, but cover all eight limbs of yoga identified in the '' Yoga Sutras'' of

Patanjali Patanjali ( sa, पतञ्जलि, Patañjali), also called Gonardiya or Gonikaputra, was a Hindu author, mystic and philosopher. Very little is known about him, and while no one knows exactly when he lived; from analysis of his works it i ...

. The 1989 competition was held in

Montevideo Montevideo () is the Capital city, capital and List of cities in Uruguay, largest city of Uruguay. According to the 2011 census, the city proper has a population of 1,319,108 (about one-third of the country's total population) in an area of . M ...

with the asana competition in Pondicherry. Competitive yoga has been practised by adults in America since 2009 under the auspices of the nonprofit organisation USA Yoga; competitions were later introduced for children from the age of 7. The fiercely contested

Bishnu Charan Ghosh Cup Bishnu Charan Ghosh (24 June 1903 – 9 July 1970) was an Indian bodybuilder and Hathayogi. He was the younger brother of yogi Paramahansa Yogananda, who wrote the 1946 book ''Autobiography of a Yogi''. In 1923, he founded the College of Physica ...

is held annually in Los Angeles. Ghosh inspired the yoga style of

Bikram Choudhury Bikram Choudhury (born 1944) is an Indian-born American yoga guru, and the founder of Bikram Yoga, a form of hot yoga consisting of a fixed series of 26 postures practised in a hot environment of . The business became a success in the United St ...

, the founder of Bikram Yoga, and Choudhury has been closely associated with America's competitive yoga from its inception. The documentary film ''Posture'' by Nathan Bender and Daniel Nelson portrays competitors and detractors of the USA Yoga Federation National Championship.

Sport or spiritual

The idea of competitive yoga seems an

oxymoron An oxymoron (usual plural oxymorons, more rarely oxymora) is a figure of speech that juxtaposes concepts with opposing meanings within a word or phrase that creates an ostensible self-contradiction. An oxymoron can be used as a rhetorical devi ...

to some people in the yoga community. The author Rajiv Malhotra described competitive yoga as "a form of misappropriation". The yoga teacher Loretta Turner called the term "offensive, because yoga is much more than posturing". The journalist Neal Pollack said that the goal of all types of yoga is

samadhi ''Samadhi'' (Pali and sa, समाधि), in Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism and yogic schools, is a state of meditative consciousness. In Buddhism, it is the last of the eight elements of the Noble Eightfold Path. In the Ashtanga Yoga ...

, "enlightened bliss where the ego separates from the self and the practitioner realizes that he's powerless to control the vagaries of an endlessly shifting universe". Instead, Pollack continued, yoga competitions consist of the performance of asanas derived from

hatha yoga Haṭha yoga is a branch of yoga which uses physical techniques to try to preserve and channel the vital force or energy. The Sanskrit word हठ ''haṭha'' literally means "force", alluding to a system of physical techniques. Some haṭha ...

. He concluded that he was not sure what he had witnessed, but he was glad to return to his usual modest yoga, free of competitiveness. Yoga practitioners and their instructors commonly work to avoid any feeling of competitiveness. The yoga instructor Tanya Boulton comments that yoga is challenging because it teaches people not to be competitive but to be at peace with themselves. Practitioners are advised not to compare themselves to other people in their class, and to accept that yoga is an inner thing, not a matter of physical perfection.

References

{{Modern yoga Yoga styles