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of spiritual philosophies and disciplines of which Hatha is just one part. Thousands of yogis and yoga lineages in India have no Hatha or asana practice at all. They focus on meditation, devotional, or philosophical practices. Some lineages actually denigrate physical practices. They believe that attention to the physical body detracts one from spiritual life and creates inappropriate attachment to the body. Hatha yogis deny this separation.
    I once heard a story about an incident at a yoga congress in India. A Hatha yoga master just completed a demonstration and talk on the importance of caring for the body and the body’s effects on mental and spiritual life. The organizer of the conference, hoping for some fireworks, had mischievously followed this speaker on the program with a swami who was known to disagree with Hatha practice. He represented a philosophical system that emphasized purely mental and inner practices.
    The swami began his talk, in which he “humbly” pointed out that, as impressive as Hatha practices are, they actually create illusion and attachment to the body. He went on to assert that the body is just an aging sack of bones, blood, and hair that will die no matter what we do. (This description may sound grotesque, but it is not that uncommon to find the body referred to this way in ancient texts that promote renunciation and detachment from the physical.) The swami continued, getting heated up and raising his voice with authority declaring that when one attains spiritual insight he would pay no attention to the body whatsoever. At this moment the first speaker got up from his chair on the stage, slipped behind the swami, and removed the thick eyeglasses the swami was wearing! “Don’t pay any attention to your body whatsoever, Swami! Detach, detach!” he shouted. “Maybe you shouldn’t even eat or take medicine either. Where do you draw the line?” The debate went on, I’m told, until the nearly blind swami was forced to plead for the return of his glasses.
    One of the beauties of Hatha yoga is that it acknowledges the interrelationship of body, mind, and spirit and explores the interactions and relationships along the body-mind continuum. Hatha yoga is predicated on the perception of a relationship between body, mind, and spirit and the appreciation of the journey of constant learning from the intelligent forces dwelling within all things. The laws of the external universe are also the laws of the internal universe. Hatha yogis see the physical and spiritual as reflecting and affecting each other, and as one process and interplay along one spectrum of energy. What happens within the body affects the mind, heart, and spirit—and the reverse is equally true. The divinity we see outside ourselves is part of the same sacred energy of life that is the body. The deeper levels of Hatha aim to bring this perception to the practitioner.

The Origins of Hatha Yoga
    Many beliefs and theories claim to explain the origins of Hatha yoga. They range from the scientific, based on archeological, anthropological, and etymological studies, to the folkloric, religious, and mythological. Scientists and scholars study and give credence only to actual historical proof to support their positions. Historical evidence has shown that the twelfth-and thirteenth-century teacher, Gorakhnath, was the original synthesizer of Hatha yoga and that, according to traditional lore, Matsyendranath (assumed to be of the tenth century) was Gorakhnath’s guru, although there is no evidence for this belief.
    Traditionalists, gurus, and believers rely on oral transmission, personal meditations, and the beliefs of their lineages. Yoga origin beliefs abound in India. Many Indian yogis assert that God or divine incarnations revealed or handed yoga down—it is a gift from the gods. Others suggest that great sages discovered yoga through meditation and divine communication or that they developed it through self-study and observation of