An Indian spiritual discipline whose name means "to yoke" or "union" — for most of its long history a rigorous path for stilling the mind and freeing the self, not a form of exercise. Rooted in the ascetic and Upanishadic world of the first millennium BCE and given classical shape in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, it taught liberation through ethics, breath, concentration, and meditation, with physical posture only one small part. The bending, stretching practice the modern world calls yoga took form mainly in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and has become a global, largely secular wellness practice that has mostly shed its metaphysics.
The word yoga means "to yoke" — to harness, to join, to bind the restless mind the way a driver bridles a team of horses. For most of its history it named not exercise but a demanding spiritual discipline whose goal was to still the mind completely and set the self free. In the classical system laid out by Patanjali, physical posture is just one of eight steps, and "posture" there means only a steady seat for meditation, not a stretch. The mats, the studios, and the athletic poses that many millions now practice are a recent chapter, mostly shaped within the last century or so, in a tradition that once promised liberation.