While yoga originated as a group of practices that have an uncertain history, there is evidence that some notions of yoga may have come from shamanic or indigenous, non-Aryan practices of India. Other elements of yoga clearly emerged from the Vedic tradition, the seminal tradition of Hinduism.

The original sense of yoga was a "yoking" ; the Sanskrit word yuj, from which yoga is derived, is actually related to the English word "yoke." Its early sense referred to a "yoking in" and a disciplining of sensual life.

Later, yoga took the sense of the word to refer to not merely a "yoking in" but to a "linking" or "yoking with" the Divine. This is where the many different yogas of the Bhagavadgita (circa 3rd century B.C.E.) begin. In Bhakti (devotional) Yoga, one disciplines oneself to focus on the Divine through devotional practices. Jnana Yoga is a more "mental-" or "knowledge-based" yoga in which the discipline leads to a direct link with the highest reality. And Karma Yoga, the yoga of action, connects the practitioner to the Divine through self-surrendered acts.

Hatha Yoga is the form most widely taught in the West and is focused on developing the physical body as an appropriate vessel to withstand and support the path of Self-realization. In many cases, however, there is a tendency to restrict the focus only to the body, with the asanas (postures) taking center stage while the path to Self-realization becomes secondary or nonexistent. The asanas were only important in the branch of yoga that developed out of the yoga master Patanjali's school. Even in Patanjali's definitive Yoga Sutra, written sometime between 200 BC and 300 AD, it is not obvious that asanas were the focus. As an aspect of "yoking in" the senses, however, bodily control and reversing the habit of having the body be in control of us were paramount in several schools.