Yoga: the trendy practice that your hippie, hipster, or fitness friends rave about. Garbed in yoga pants and carrying colorful mats bought off Amazon, the modern-day "yogi" attends one-hour classes that focus on physical stretching, movement, and detoxing from their busy modern lives. We hear a lot about the benefits of yoga, from its ability to decrease stress, chronic pain, as well as the risk for chronic diseases like obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

What we don't hear about as often, however, is the history of yoga. Most people are aware of its Indian spiritual and religious roots, but those tend to get washed out by the manufactured, commodified versions of yoga we see today. Perhaps that's because research on yoga's origins is hard to find, and its history is a complicated, lengthy narrative. In fact, yoga is incredibly complex - even the word "yoga" has taken on hundreds of different meanings and practices throughout the years. What you and I might assume is "yoga" is probably not even closely related to what yoga was thousands of years ago.