In the 20th century, a development of hatha yoga focusing particularly on asanas (the physical postures) became popular throughout the world as a form of physical exercise. These later texts promote a universalist yoga, available to all, 'without the need for priestly intermediaries, ritual paraphernalia or sectarian initiations.' Later Nāth as well as Śākta texts adopt the practices of hatha yoga mudras into a Saiva system, melding them with Layayoga methods, without mentioning bindu. However, other early Nāth texts like the Vivekamārtaṇḍa can be seen as co-opting the hatha yoga mudrās. Early Nāth works teach a yoga based on raising kuṇḍalinī through energy channels and chakras, called Layayoga ('the yoga of dissolution'). Īlmost all hathayogic texts belong to the Nath siddhas, and the important early ones (11th-13th c.) are credited to Matsyendranatha and his disciple, Gorakhnath or Gorakshanath (11th c.). Two early hatha yoga techniques sought to either physically reverse this process of dripping by using gravity to trap the bindhu in inverted postures like viparītakaraṇī, or force bindu upwards through the central channel by directing the breath flow into the centre channel using mudras (yogic seals, not to be confused with hand mudras, which are gestures). This was seen as the physical essence of life that was constantly dripping down from the head and being lost. Some of the early hatha yoga texts (11th-13th c.) describe methods to raise and conserve bindu (vital force, that is, semen, and in women rajas – menstrual fluid). Hindu hatha yoga texts appear from the 11th century onward. The oldest texts to use the terminology of hatha are also Vajrayana Buddhist. The oldest dated text so far found to describe hatha yoga, the 11th-century Amṛtasiddhi, comes from a tantric Buddhist milieu. Some hatha yoga style techniques can be traced back at least to the 1st-century CE, in texts such as the Hindu Sanskrit epics and Buddhism's Pali canon. The Sanskrit word हठ haṭha literally means 'force', alluding to a system of physical techniques. Hatha yoga ( / ˈ h ʌ t ə, ˈ h ɑː t ə/ IAST: Haṭha-yoga) is a branch of yoga that uses physical techniques to try to preserve and channel vital force or energy.

Traditional hatha yoga sequence