Yoga (group)

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Considering all that Osho talks about Yoga -- and it's a lot, ten vols of Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega (series) -- extolling the virtues of Patanjali's scientific system of using the mind and body to go beyond the mind and body, it is perhaps surprising that there appears to have been so little offered in the way of Yoga groups.

Maybe more will turn up, but for now all we can find is one small run in Feb-Mar 1976, according to the groups timeline chart in The Sound of Running Water, and an entry in a Darshan Diary, Nothing to Lose but Your Head (Feb 26):

The sannyasins who had joined the recently-formed Yoga class, were at darshan. The instructor, Pujari, describes the purpose of the classes as ...
"Being able to experience your physical barriers that are keeping you from enjoying a strong, flexible, and well-toned body.
"This is a yoga class without goals -- nowhere to get, nothing to achieve, nothing to become, but simply experiencing where you are at. Don't come to learn to relax, come to experience your tension. Don't come to get stronger, come to experience your weakness. Experience your stiffness, and you will get in touch with the flexibility that is already there. Silent meditation and chanting will be done as well as exercises.
"Your body is your temple for your inner work. Love it, care for it, and grow".
The group meets three mornings a week for an hour.
Pujari said that his teacher, Mr. Iyengar, in Poona, wanted him to teach Yoga as he taught it. Pujari felt it perhaps better to teach a synthesis of what he had learnt from Mr. Iyengar as well as experience that he had gained from other teachers. He asked Bhagwan if he should "do my own thing".

Osho answers in the affirmative, that he should, "Absorb whatsoever you can from anywhere, and always create a synthesis out of your own experience".

The page on the Yoga (series) referenced above addresses what may be a key point in the mystery of the non-appearance of a Yoga group. It notes, "In his previous long-running series of talks in English, The Book of the Secrets / Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, ended just a month before the Yoga series started, Osho had expounded on the value of 'let-go', non-control and spontaneity, over what he characterized as yoga's focus on effort. Here, celebrating the strengths of Patanjali's approach, it is not effort but science".

It may be this element of "effort", and Osho's occasional characterization of Yoga as repressive that has doomed any would-be Yoga group. Although Osho wanted to give Patanjali his due -- and noting the appeal of Yoga in the West -- it may have had too much baggage to have much of a place in his ashram. See also the hybrid Tantra Yoga, which had somewhat of a longer run.