How Ancient is Pincha Mayurasana? 🦚

How ancient is Pincha Mayurasana? 🦚🤷🏾‍♂️

Over the next week, you are going to see Laura and me (on the Gram) taking you through some of the basic steps towards Pincha Mayūrāsana, with a different tip every day.

It can seem like quite a daunting pose, but it is brilliant for developing core strength and overall stamina. There is actually less brute strength required than most people think. Strength matters, obviously, but so does shoulder mobility, balance, positioning and learning how to "stack" your body in the right place.

The point of this email, though, is not to teach you Pincha. Laura and I will attempt that through the week on Instagram.

I want to talk about where the pose came from. The origins of the pose. As some people are clearly fascinated but it. Because a quick interesting fact, previously most people find our website through a blog I wrote - Is Yoga. Religion?

And now, its my blog on the mythological origins of The Dancer Pose. Which btw, Chat GPT when scanning my blogs said was poorly written and could do with a refresh 😤 You can imagine by response. I left it as is.

Anyway. The origins of yoga poses are complicated, mainly because modern yoga culture likes everything to be either 15,000 years old or completely invented by Western gymnastics in the 1930's. The truth, as usual, sits somewhere in the middle.

In Yoga Body, Mark Singleton explains how the yoga taught by the grandfather of modern yoga Krishnamacharya in Mysore during the 1930s developed through a mixture of older Haṭha Yoga, Indian wrestling, the influence of western physical culture and European gymnastics.

So yes, Western gymnastics influenced modern postural yoga, but it would be completely wrong to say India simply borrowed gymnastics, sprinkled some Sanskrit over it and called the whole thing yoga. Which to be fair is what most people do in 2026 🫣. But that's a rant for another day 🧐

Long before the great Krishnamacharya, Indian texts contained non-seated poses, balances, inversions and some surprisingly dynamic movements. An eighteenth-century text called the Haṭhābhyāsapaddhati (try saying that real quick), for example, describes 112 postures, including repeated movements and practices using ropes.

The older poses were already there. Modern yoga then borrowed, adapted, experimented and created something new from everything it encountered, which is what yoga has always done.

Now this is where Western yoga practitioners have often got carried away. They have found the first reference to a peacock 🦚 inside an old mythological story, connect a few completely unrelated dots and suddenly announce that we have discovered the spiritual origins of the pose 🤷🏾‍♂️

Kartikeya, the son of Shiva and Parvati, rides a peacock, so it would be very easy for me to tell you that Pincha Mayurasana represents his courage, the destruction of the ego or the transformation of fear. It would also give somebody enough material for an entire workshop and at least three Instagram reels 🫣

But there is no evidence that the pose was created to tell Kartikeya’s story. A cultural connection is not the same as a historical origin 😏 Know what I mean?

Some yoga poses have genuine connections to Indian mythology, and I have covered some of them in previous blogs. Many poses, though, have no grand story behind them. Somebody developed a shape, gave it a name and it became part of the practice.

Pincha looks a little like the tail feathers of a peacock opening above the body, so the simplest explanation is that one day in India, somebody looked at someone doing the pose and said; "Wow bro, you look splendid, like a feathered Peacock".

I wonder if Chat GPT would tell me to keep the above line or remove it? 🫣

My point is not every pose is hiding a secret message from Shiva.

And as some of you will know, I still struggle with Pincha. For years I practised and taught the deep back-bending version, moving towards Scorpion (called Tiger pose 🐅 - I was busting this out in 2017) and eventually that version caught up with my fairly fragile lower back. I built patterns into the pose that are now difficult to undo, so I am having to go backwards and relearn parts of it.

If you struggle with Pincha, I am right there with you fam.

And that is what Laura and I will be exploring over the next week. We will give you different tips, preparations and ways of understanding the pose so it feels less like one enormous impossible shape and more like a collection of smaller things you can actually work on. Small things make the biggest changes.

You do not need to conquer Pincha for the pose to give you something btw. Holding it for one more second is progress. Coming out with more control is progress. Understanding why you keep falling in the same direction is... progress. What you learn about yourself while wobbling around and trying not to land on your face is where all the useful parts of yoga is. That will make more sense to you when you are in it 😬.

Keep an eye on my Instagram over the next week. Pincha may ruffle your feathers, but Laura and I will break it down so you are not just winging it 🙃

I can’t promise you’ll look like a magnificent peacock by Friday. Some of us will still resemble a startled pigeon falling off a roof. But at least we’ll understand why we fell, which in yoga counts as wisdom 🦚

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Namaskar - Eternal Seeker

Zahir Akram

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