I Grew Up in India. This Is What Yoga Actually Is.
- Yoga Instructor
- May 16
- 4 min read
I want to tell you something that might surprise you.
I did not start yoga in a studio. I did not discover it through an app, a YouTube video, or a friend who swore by hot yoga.
I started yoga on the floor of my home in Chennai, Tamil Nadu — a coastal city in South India — before I was old enough to know it had a name.
What yoga looked like in Chennai
My family didn't call it 'practice.' They didn't call it anything. It was simply how life was organised.
We sat on the floor. Every day, for meals, for conversation, for quiet time. What I know now — with years of anatomy study and teacher training behind me — is that this daily floor-sitting was gently, continuously opening my hips. Connecting the base of my spine to the earth. Building what we might now call Mooladhara — the root.
My family taught me Padmasana — lotus pose — and Tadasana — mountain pose — not as postures to achieve but as ways of being. They taught me Pranayama — breathing exercises — not as a warm-up but as the foundation of everything else. How to inhale fully. How to exhale completely. How the breath connects the body and the mind.
They also taught me how to eat. Ayurveda wasn't a wellness trend in our home. The right foods for the right seasons. Food as medicine before medicine was needed. Nobody called any of this yoga. It was just life.
What happened when yoga came West
Something interesting — and in some ways, yoga took different form when it travelled from India to the West.
The postures arrived beautifully. The studios are wonderful. The mats are excellent. But some of the deeper layers got left behind.
Yoga, in its original form, is not a fitness practice. It is a system for understanding yourself. The physical postures — asanas — are one of eight limbs described by Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras. Just one of eight. And even within the asanas, the goal was never flexibility or strength. The goal was Sthira Sukham — steadiness and ease. A body prepared to sit in stillness long enough to meet the mind.
The five Koshas — the five layers of the self — describe the human being as far more than a physical body. There is Annamaya Kosha, the food body. But also Pranamaya Kosha, the energy body. Manomaya Kosha, the mental body. Vijnanamaya Kosha, the intellectual body. Anandamaya Kosha — the body of bliss, the deepest layer, the one yoga is ultimately pointing toward.
A class that only addresses the first layer — the physical body — is like reading the first page of a very long and beautiful book and thinking you have finished it.
The guru and the student
There is another thing that got left behind: the relationship.
In the Indian tradition — and this is something I feel deeply — yoga was always passed from one person to another. Guru to student. Not in groups of thirty. One to one. The teacher observes this specific body, this specific breath, this specific mind. The teacher adjusts the practice accordingly.
This is why, when I began teaching seniors here in Arizona, something clicked immediately. Each person was completely different. What a 25-year-old can do in Warrior I is simply not what a 70-year-old body should attempt in the same way. The hip anatomy, the bone density, the muscle flexibility, the nervous system — everything is different. Every cue needs to be different.
The block under the hands in Low Lunge is not a modification for people who 'can't do yoga.' It is the correct expression of the pose for that person's body on that day. The pose serves the practitioner. The practitioner does not serve the pose.
What I want you to take from this
Western yoga goals are different compared to Indian tradition. I love that millions of people have found their way to the mat. I love that the conversation about breath, about stillness, about the mind-body connection is happening everywhere.
But I want to offer something additional. A thread back to the source.
When you come to a class at YogaStayFit, I bring all of this with me. The Chennai floor. The Pranayama taught to me before I knew what Pranayama was. The Patanjali sutras. The anatomy that I have spent years studying so that your body is safe and your practice is sustainable. The philosophy — the Bhagavad Gita, the Koshas, the five Kleshas — that makes yoga not just a Tuesday morning activity but a lens through which to see your whole life more clearly.
Sthira Sukham Asanam. Steady. Comfortable. That is the standard. Not impressive. Not Instagram-worthy. Steady and comfortable — in your body, in your breath, in yourself.
That is the yoga I grew up with. That is the yoga I teach.
Raj Krishnamoorthy is a certified RYT yoga teacher, born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. He has studied Ashtanga under Sharath Jois in Mysuru, and trained in Iyengar, Hatha and Vinyasa in Rishikesh. He now teaches live online yoga classes from Phoenix, Arizona — every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.
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