Yogi

A yogi is a practitioner of yoga in the disciplinary sense, one who has undertaken a systematic training of body, breath and mind directed toward liberation.

The discipline

The yogi is defined by practice rather than by office: the systematic training of the body through posture, of the breath through control, and of the mind through concentration and meditation, aimed in the classical systems at the stilling of the mind and the realisation of the true self or at union with the divine. The word covers a wide range, from the ascetic who has renounced the world for intensive practice to any serious practitioner of the disciplines of yoga, and the corresponding term for a woman is yogini.

From asceticism to the modern world

Historically the yogi was often an ascetic, sometimes belonging to orders such as the Nath yogis known for austere and physical disciplines, and the figure of the yogi with extraordinary powers gained through practice is old in Indian tradition. In the modern period yoga has been widely transmitted as a practice of health and meditation across the world, so the word now spans the traditional ascetic adept and the contemporary practitioner, and an honest account keeps the range in view. What unites the uses is the core sense of one who follows a disciplined training of body and mind, and the office, such as it is, rests on that practice rather than on any conferred rank.

Long before yoga became a global wellness practice, some organised orders of yogis, above all the Nath order of ascetics, were also armed and organised bodies who traded, lent money, and at times fought as mercenaries for regional rulers across early modern India, a martial and commercial history documented in temple and court records and now well established in the historical scholarship on the period, and one that sits uneasily beside the purely contemplative image the word yogi carries today.

The globalisation of yoga over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has separated the postural practice, asana, almost entirely from the ascetic and renunciant tradition the word yogi originally named, producing a large commercial industry of studios, retreats and standardised teacher certifications, typically built around a two-hundred-hour training course, that qualify someone to teach postures and breathing to paying students without any of the renunciation, lineage or spiritual discipline the traditional yogi undertook. That gap has generated an ongoing debate, inside and outside India, over cultural appropriation and over how much of the word's original religious and philosophical content survives its transplantation into a fitness and wellness market.