The Stories of Hanuman & Why Myths Matter

This month in group classes, we’re exploring a favorite pose family of mine (by request of a student!): Hanumanasana, (also known as the splits). Usually, when I announce this, I’m greeted by some looks of panic and a few that seem to say “but we’re not doing the splits TODAY, right?”

While there is a lot to say about the poses and the 360-degree nature of the way our hip joins function and the fantastic anatomy we could get into, we’ll have to save that for another post! My favorite part about a month-long exploration of Hanumanasana is that it gives us an opportunity to unpack a little at a time the mythology surrounding the figure of Hanuman and what it might mean for us, today, in our own journey of yoga. I will write more about this as we explore each week, but for today we’ll start where we’ve started in classes, with a framing of what even is a myth and why it matters.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a myth as “a traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining some natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events.” The value of a myth though, I think, is that these stories give us an opportunity to see ourselves and our human experiences reflected inside of something larger.

Let’s start with a little background on Hanuman if you’re unfamiliar. Please note that throughout, I’ll speak from my own understanding, and with a bit of artistic license as to how these stories have landed for me as a student and practitioner. As a devotee of Ram, Hanuman is one of the central characters in the Ramayana, a Hindu epic; that however you slice it is very old. One estimate I found via the British Library attributes authorship to the Sage Valkimi, dating back to 500 BCE - 100 BCE! He is also mentioned in several other texts written at varying times.

Hanuman is said to be the son of Vayu, the God of the wind, who plays a role in Hanuman’s birth. As a result of this supernatural parentage, Hanuman has the power of flight, as well as an Alice-in Wonderland-like ability to grow or shrink his form. A lot of the stories surrounding Hanuman’s early years always read to me with a “naughty trickster” vibe that as a mom I witness at work in my own kids as they’re moving through childhood and adolescence.

In one of the first stories of Hanuman as a child, he mistakes the sun for a ripe mango and leaps up to eat it. Just before he can make contact, the God Indra strikes him down, breaking his jaw (this does have a lot of parallels to the Greek story of Icarus, doesn’t it?). Jumping ahead a bit, we continue to see Hanuman misbehaving, until his tricks culminate in him pranking a meditating sage. This prank proves to be the one that went too far, and in a rage the sage curses him to forget both his powers and who he truly is. In our class explorations, this is where we have left the story this week.

This forgetting is actually where our own story as yoga practitioners begins. As many of you likely know, the word “yoga” is derived from the Sanskrit word “yuj” which means to yoke, join, or unite. We often hear in yoga class that yoga is the “union of the breath and body” or the “union of the body and the mind”. While not untrue, those are surface-level understandings or sentiments. Asana (postural practice) and pranayama aim us toward the state of meditation which I think could be interpreted as a union of mind and body. But I believe that the union the word yoga refers to is pointing at something much deeper than that: the union of Self with source, or said another way, the dissolving of the things that separate us from our ability to understand the truth of our nature. Yoga as a spiritual practice is not a process of creating or becoming, but a process of peeling back and removing the layers, lenses, and conditioning that cause us to forget or be asleep to the truth of ourselves and the bigger whole we belong to.

In this we see can see where the story of Hanuman reflects our own story back to us. We begin with having forgotten or being asleep to our truth, connection, and power. Another place we see a similar parallel reflected is in the understanding of the forces of purusha and prakriti from Sankhya philosophy. Here we see prakriti representing form and the material world. Anything that is manifest, temporal, or belonging to our human experience could be said to be prakriti. Purusha, then, represents that which is more eternal, formless, timeless, and unchanging. If purusha were the ocean, prakriti might be the waves. We, in our beautiful temporary wave of human life, often forget that we came from and belong to the much bigger ocean of the whole.

These are the spaces we’ve been exploring into in class over the past week, and I look forward to adding the next chapter to our exploration with all of you this week! Let me know how it lands for you.