'DOES IT BOTHER YOU THAT YOGA IS BEING MARKETED PURELY AS A FITNESS REGIMEN?" - B. K. S. IYENGAR ANSWERS

The fact is that yoga is open to interpretation. For instance, Patanjali talks of sexual yoga and ifsomeone decides to reduce yoga to just that what can one do? I can‘t blame people for exploiting its open-endedness. After all, in the 1950s when I was in the West trying to propagate yoga it would not have helped if I carried on about spiritualism and philosophy. So I connected with them in whatever way I could --by showing them the physical prowess that yoga brings. I lived only on bread and coffee those days, because there was hardly any vegetarian food available. They saw me teaching eight-nine hours a day on this diet and saw that I still had the strength to throw them over --so I had to stress on physicality. It was only after a decade that I slowly started talking about the intellect and the mind and consciousness. They were ready for it by then. So you see the market-driven yoga industry evolving into something more deep one day?Yoga is being exploited and that is giving it a bad name. But, the spokes of the wheel go down and then they have to come up, don‘t they? (laughs) It can‘t get any worse so it has to get better. Today anyone can be called a yoga teacher but people will see light someday, look for true gurus. - From an Interview with Iyengar shortly before his death in 2014