Why this page exists
This page is a genealogy. It traces the styles you meet in a studio back through their teachers to the texts they all draw on, and it marks where each one touches the eight limbs.
A first thing worth saying plainly: these styles are not an extra limb. Almost all of them are ways of practicing asana, the third limb, usually leaning on pranayama, the fourth. In the older sense of the word, nearly all of them are hatha yoga, the yoga of the body set down in the roughly fourteenth-to-fifteenth-century Hatha Yoga Pradipika. What separates them is temper: how fast they move, how long they hold, how much heat they build, and which tissue or state of mind they work. I have marked each style on a warm-to-cool spectrum, from the most heating and active to the most cooling and receptive.
There is an older and larger sense of the word worth holding onto. In the premodern sources, as James Mallinson and Mark Singleton note in Roots of Yoga, “in a majority of texts the word yoga more commonly indicates the goal achieved through these practices,” a state to be reached rather than a thing one does. The earliest known definition, in the roughly third-century-BCE Katha Upanishad, names as yoga not a posture at all but the inward stillness this site treats under pratyahara, “the condition in which the senses are held still and one becomes undistracted” (Katha Upanishad 6.11). Read that way, the styles below are less kinds of yoga than ways of moving toward the state the word first named.
A second thing, in keeping with how this site handles claims. The styles below are mostly twentieth-century creations, however ancient they feel. Most descend from one man, Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, teaching in a Mysore palace in the 1930s, and the scholarship of Mark Singleton and Elizabeth De Michelis shows how much modern posture practice owes to that recent moment and to the physical culture around it. De Michelis gave the thing a name, Modern Postural Yoga, and took Iyengar Yoga and the Ashtanga Yoga of Pattabhi Jois as its clearest examples, the schools in which posture itself became the center of the practice. She dates the wider movement even more precisely: its seminal text, she argues, is Swami Vivekananda’s 1896 Raja Yoga, calling “the shaping of Modern Yoga, of which Raja Yoga is the seminal text,” his most lasting achievement, and she places the birth of the posture-centred form in 1920s India, where the first schools built it as “a sort of indigenized (and ‘spiritualized’) version of British” physical education. Those datings are her scholarly argument rather than settled fact, and the labels Modern Yoga and Modern Postural Yoga are her own coinages. I name founders and dates so the recent things are not mistaken for the eternal ones, and where a style rests on a mechanism the evidence does not support, I say so.
There is a harder tension underneath the whole tree, and it is worth naming plainly. Many teachers present the physical practice as rooted directly in the Bhagavad Gita, taught as an unbroken line running from Krishna’s counsel straight to the mat. The Gita, though, prescribes no postures. What it teaches is yoga as paths that can be walked: karma yoga, disciplined action performed without attachment to its fruits; bhakti yoga, devotion; and jnana yoga, knowledge, in Barbara Stoler Miller’s reading of it. The postural form most of us practice took much of its present shape in the twentieth century, as the scholarship above shows. So the connection worth drawing is not descent but embodiment. Our physical practice can become a way of living what the primary texts actually teach: holding a shape with steadiness and ease, sthira and sukha in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra 2.46, and acting with full effort while loosening the grip on the outcome, which is the Gita’s disciplined action. Read that way, the Gita and the older texts inform how we practice rather than authoring the postures themselves. The tension is real, between a felt sense of ancient roots and a documented recent history, and this site keeps both in view rather than settling it by pretending the shapes are old.
Contemporary teachers make a kindred point from the activist side rather than the archive. Jacoby Ballard notes that asana, though only one of the eight limbs and developed “more extensively at least partly due to the European influence of gymnastics,” is nonetheless “marketed as if it is the whole of yoga practice.” Rebby Kern names the loss plainly, that “Westerners chose to pick up the physical asana while leaving behind the spiritual principles and tools.” And Sunaina Rangnekar points to who polices the result, arguing that “this able-bodied version of Yoga in the west is maintained at an institutional level through organizations like Yoga Alliance,” and asking who decided they were the authority. These are teacher and activist essays from a reputable nonprofit press rather than peer-reviewed history: the gymnastics point echoes Singleton’s scholarship above, and the rest is offered as critique to weigh rather than as settled fact.
Read the tree from left to right. The three classical source texts sit at the far left; from them each lineage branches rightward, carrying the styles that grew from it. Tap any node, a text, a teacher, or a style, to open its source, its principles, the limbs it reaches toward, and a short example of how a class in that style is shaped.
One tree, read from the left
A caution before you open anything: these are lineages, not inventions. The teacher named inside a style’s story is usually the one who shaped or carried it, not its sole author, and the roots often run centuries deeper than the label. Where a documented source cannot be verified, the note says so.
Moving between these lineages asks for the same honesty. Susanna Barkataki suggests naming where a practice comes from rather than absorbing it as your own: a teacher can begin, in her words, “This is who I am, this is how I learned; I have a lot of respect for the lineage.” She frames the difference between appreciation and appropriation as two things done together, balancing power toward the source culture and practicing ahimsa, non-harm, toward the people who carry it.
- The classical source textstap a text, a teacher, or a style
A dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna inside the Mahabharata epic. It frames yoga as paths that can be walked: karma yoga, the yoga of selfless action; bhakti yoga, of devotion; and jnana yoga, of knowledge. Dating is contested, roughly the second century BCE to the second century CE.
The source of the eight-limbed path, ashtanga, and of yoga defined as citta-vritti-nirodha, the stilling of the mind's turnings. It is a philosophy and meditation text; it prescribes no fitness postures. Authorship and date are unsettled, with estimates spanning the second century BCE to the fifth century CE; the scholar Georg Feuerstein places its formulation “some time in the second century c.e.” and reads Classical Yoga as distinctively dualist, separating spirit or Self (purusha) from nature (prakriti), where most other Hindu yoga schools are nondualist.
J. Neil Otte adds that this is a weak dualism rather than a Cartesian one: where Descartes holds mind and body finally irreconcilable, Patanjali’s split is one “wherein both mind and body are revealed in samadhi to be in unity.” Even the dualist reading is aimed at a final union.
The synthesizing classic of premodern hatha, the yoga of the body. Its title translates as Light on Hatha Yoga, and its roughly 389 verses run to four chapters covering asana, pranayama, mudra and bandha, and samadhi, along with diet and kundalini. Its date is contested: Georg Feuerstein places its composition in the mid-fourteenth century, while other scholars hold to the fifteenth. Nearly every postural style on this page is, in the old sense, its descendant. The text itself frames hatha as a preparation, not an end: its opening verse salutes “Adinatha (Siva) who expounded the knowledge of Hatha Yoga, which like a staircase leads the aspirant to the high pinnacled Raja Yoga” (I.1, tr. Pancham Sinh), the tradition’s own statement that the physical work exists to ready the practitioner for the meditative path. Scholars count it as one of three classical manuals of hatha, set beside the Shiva Samhita and the Gheranda Samhita, the last of which frames a dialogue between the sage Gheranda and the pupil Chanda and organizes practice into seven exercises rather than eight limbs, “purificatory, strengthening, steadying, calming, and those leading to lightness, perception, and isolation” (Gheranda Samhita I.2, tr. Vasu).
The trunk of most modern posture practice. A Sanskrit and philosophy scholar, Krishnamacharya built a dynamic system of postures linked by repeating sun salutations while teaching at the Jaganmohan Palace in Mysore from 1933. His guiding tenet was that practice must be fitted to the time, the place, and the individual student. Three of his students carried three different readings of that teaching out into the world, and much of the tree below grows from him. A fourth student, Indra Devi, carried it further west still, teaching yoga to Hollywood stars and, later, to leaders in the Soviet Union.
Her entry to the lineage was not freely given. Michelle Goldberg records that Krishnamacharya at first refused to teach Eugenie Peterson, both a woman and a foreigner, so she went over his head to the Maharaja of Mysore, “devoted to spreading the wonders of yoga to the West,” who ordered Krishnamacharya to take her on. The westward transmission turned on a royal command overriding an orthodox barrier, not on any smooth outflow of an ancient tradition.
This is also where honesty matters most. Krishnamacharya's Mysore is recent history. Working from the administrative records of the Jaganmohan Palace, Mark Singleton found that Krishnamacharya's classes were filed there under “physical culture,” among gymnastics and Western games, and that sun salutation was taught as a separate class not yet counted as part of yogasana. His system, on that reading, was a synthesis of several methods of physical training that before this moment would have fallen outside any definition of yoga. Singleton points to one concrete parallel: the Danish educator Niels Bukh’s Primitive Gymnastics, like the Ashtanga sequence, was graded into six progressive series, and Singleton counts “at least twenty-eight of the exercises in the first edition of Bukh’s manual” that are “strikingly similar (often identical) to yoga postures occurring in Pattabhi Jois’s Ashtanga sequence or in Iyengar’s Light on Yoga.” He is careful to say this is not proof that Krishnamacharya borrowed from Bukh, only that his method closely matched one of the dominant gymnastic forms of the day. Singleton traces a second, separate root as well, in the women’s “harmonial gymnastics” of figures like Genevieve Stebbins: his argument is that “these women, and others like them, promoted modes of ‘spiritual stretching’ and deep breathing that endure today (and among a similar demographic) as ‘yoga.’” Both are his scholarly readings, offered as documented parallels rather than proven lines of descent. Norman Sjoman, whose The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace works directly from the palace’s own library and records, argues the same from another angle. His central evidence is the Sritattvanidhi, a Mysore palace text illustrated in the 1880s that he calls the oldest document yet found substantiating a developed asana practice. Reading it against the palace records, Sjoman concludes that the physical training under Krishnaraja Wodeyar’s court was a combination of an indigenous Indian exercise system, carried in the vyayamasalas, the gymnasiums of the wrestler and ascetic orders, and Western gymnastics, so that the Mysore asana method braided hatha yoga together with that local physical culture. He goes so far as to read the sun salutation and its linking vinyasas as an older series of push-up-like exercises broken down into named postures. Elizabeth De Michelis reaches a kindred conclusion about how much of what we now call ancient yoga was shaped in that century. The practices are real and worth doing; their claimed antiquity is often younger than it sounds.
B.K.S. Iyengar was Krishnamacharya's brother-in-law and student. He spent some seventy-five years refining a method of alignment at the institute in Pune. He was first drawn to the West in the 1950s as the personal teacher of the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, which opened the door to his long influence in Britain.
Precision, timing, and sequencing, with props such as belts, blocks, ropes, and blankets so that any body can find the shape of a pose. Postures are held long, alignment is studied closely, and the whole system is grounded in Patanjali's eight limbs. In his late book Light on Life, Iyengar framed that outer alignment as a means to an inner one, aligning the five sheaths of being, the koshas, from the physical body toward the soul, so that asana becomes a path to integration and wholeness rather than only correct form.
Standing poses held for many breaths, each corrected in detail → props brought in to deepen or support → inversions such as headstand and shoulderstand → seated work and a long, precise Savasana.
One caution belongs with any inversion-heavy practice. In rare cases, extreme flexion or extension of the neck can injure the vertebral arteries and set off a stroke. William Broad gathers the documented reports in The Science of Yoga, among them a physician-led team that in 1977 described a practitioner who suffered a major stroke after a Shoulderstand, alongside earlier cases tied to the Wheel and to a long Headstand. These events are rare and appear to depend on a pre-existing weakness in the arteries that is hard to detect in advance, so the point is not to abandon inversions but to load the neck gently and to treat sudden neck pain, dizziness, or one-sided numbness during or after practice as a reason to stop and seek care.
Grows out of Iyengar's therapeutic use of props. Judith Hanson Lasater, who studied with Iyengar for about twenty-five years, shaped it into a distinct practice and set it down in her book Relax and Renew in 1995.
Fully supported, passive poses held for long minutes on bolsters and blankets, so the body can release completely. The aim is deep rest and a downshift of the nervous system. The pose is brought to the person rather than the person to the pose.
Supported reclined bound angle → supported forward fold over a bolster → legs up the wall → supported gentle backbend → a very long Savasana. Four or five poses can fill an hour.
A senior Iyengar teacher, John Friend, added a heart-centered, non-dual Tantric philosophy to Iyengar-style alignment and named the result Anusara, roughly "flowing with grace," in 1997.
Five Universal Principles of Alignment layered over a devotional, life-affirming Tantric outlook. The practice pairs careful alignment with an intention of opening to the divine.
Anusara's founder resigned in 2012 after allegations of sexual relationships with students and employees and the freezing of the staff pension fund, and most of its senior teachers left. The teachers who stayed rebuilt the school without him. The alignment principles are useful; I keep the founder's conduct in view rather than out of it, and I believe those who came forward. Documented by scholar Andrea Jain.
Krishnamacharya's student K. Pattabhi Jois systematized a vigorous, fixed practice in Mysore, tracing its sequences to a text called the Yoga Korunta whose provenance is doubtful.
Fixed progressive series, Primary through Advanced. Vinyasa means breath-synchronized movement; ujjayi breath and the bandhas build internal heat, and drishti gaze points steady the mind. John Scott, teaching from the Jois lineage, names this union of breath, bandha, and gaze tristhana, the three places of attention that turn the vinyasa sequence from exercise into a moving meditation. Physically demanding and the same each day.
Sun Salutation A and B, several rounds each → the standing sequence → the seated Primary Series with a vinyasa between poses → backbends → the finishing sequence of inversions → rest.
The unfixed child of Ashtanga Vinyasa. It grew directly out of the Mysore method as teachers trained in Pattabhi Jois’s set series began to improvise, keeping Ashtanga’s engine, the breath-linked movement and the vinyasa that carries the body between poses, while letting go of the fixed sequence. Where Ashtanga repeats one series, Vinyasa Flow composes a fresh one each class.
One breath, one movement, as in Ashtanga: ujjayi breath, sun salutations, and the vinyasa as the connective tissue between pose families, but the teacher builds a new wave toward a chosen peak rather than following a set list. Warming, athletic, and adaptable to the room. This is the style I teach, and the craft the rest of this site’s Asana section is built around.
The arc explained on the Sequencing page: a wave that centers, warms, builds through standing work to a peak, then descends through counterposes to rest.
A vigorous, fitness-oriented adaptation of Ashtanga made for the Western studio and gym. Beryl Bender Birch, who learned Ashtanga through a direct Jois student, coined the name “power yoga” in late-1980s New York and published Power Yoga in 1995. Bryan Kest built a parallel Power Yoga on the West Coast and opened one of the first donation-based studios.
Ashtanga’s strong, heating practice loosened from the fixed series and reframed around strength, sweat, and accessibility, so it could be taught in a gym or a general studio without the Mysore commitment. Breath-linked and athletic, pitched as fitness as much as tradition.
Krishnamacharya's son T.K.V. Desikachar carried on his father's later, most individualized teaching and founded the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram in Chennai in 1976. The label "Viniyoga" is often associated in the United States with his student Gary Kraftsow.
Practice shaped to the single student's body, breath, age, and aim. Breath leads the movement, and there is no fixed sequence. Strongly therapeutic in orientation.
Not a single style but the clinical application of yoga to individual health conditions, drawing especially on the individualized Krishnamacharya and Viniyoga stream. It is anchored by the International Association of Yoga Therapists, IAYT, founded in 1989.
Asana, breath, meditation, and lifestyle fitted to a specific person and condition, with therapeutic rather than fitness goals. Practitioners credential through the C-IAYT certification and accredited training programs, and the field publishes its own peer-reviewed research.
One of Krishnamacharya’s first Western students and the first prominent woman to carry his teaching abroad. Born Eugenie Peterson in Latvia, she trained in the Mysore shala, opened a studio in Hollywood in 1947, and taught across the United States, Mexico, and the Soviet Union, doing much of the early work of bringing asana to a Western public.
Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh (1887–1963), a physician turned monk, founded the Divine Life Society and taught a devotional, whole-limbed yoga. His disciples carried distinct readings of it to the West.
Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh taught his disciple Swami Vishnudevananda, who systematized the practice and carried it to the West, founding the international Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centres from 1959.
The Five Points of Yoga: proper exercise, proper breathing, proper relaxation, proper vegetarian diet, and positive thinking with meditation. A set sequence of twelve basic postures, with relaxation between them.
Sun Salutations and breathing → headstand → shoulderstand and plough → fish → seated forward fold → cobra, locust, bow → seated twist → standing poses → deep relaxation.
Swami Satchidananda, ordained by Swami Sivananda, founded the Integral Yoga Institute in Manhattan in 1966 and famously opened the 1969 Woodstock festival.
A gentle hatha practice inside a larger synthesis of six branches, hatha, raja, bhakti, karma, jnana, and japa, with an emphasis on selfless service and interfaith understanding. Its motto: "an easeful body, a peaceful mind, and a useful life."
A separate guru lineage named for Swami Kripalu (Kripalvananda) and carried to the United States by his disciple Amrit Desai. It is not a Sivananda offshoot.
Named for Swami Kripalu, and brought to the United States by his disciple Amrit Desai, who founded the Yoga Society of Pennsylvania in 1966. It grew into the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. This is a separate guru lineage, not a Sivananda offshoot.
Meditation in motion. Attention turns inward, poses follow the body's natural flow of prana rather than being forced, and the practice moves in stages toward stillness. Nondogmatic and grounded in the eight limbs.
In 1994, revelations of sexual and financial improprieties by Amrit Desai led the community to call for his resignation, in the center's own telling. Kripalu remade itself afterward as a secular, board-governed retreat and education center. The practice outlived the guru model that started it, and I trust the community's account.
Bishnu Charan Ghosh (1903–1970) of Calcutta, younger brother of Paramahansa Yogananda, taught a strength- and health-oriented hatha. His student Bikram Choudhury built a branded, heated sequence from that teaching.
Bikram Choudhury credited his teacher Bishnu Ghosh of Calcutta, brother of Paramahansa Yogananda, and built a branded, heated system from 1973 in Los Angeles. "Hot yoga" is the broader, unbranded practice in a heated room that followed.
A fixed sequence of twenty-six postures and two breathing exercises, about ninety minutes, in a room heated to roughly 105 degrees Fahrenheit.
Bikram Choudhury faced multiple lawsuits from women alleging sexual assault and harassment, a large civil judgment, and an arrest warrant, after which he left the United States. Hot yoga is widely taught now without his name or his scripted dialogue. I keep this history visible and believe those who came forward.
Older tantric and kundalini currents, together with the Bihar School of Yoga founded by Swami Satyananda (himself a disciple of Sivananda), feed practices centered on energy, breath, sound, and inner awareness far more than on posture.
Kundalini is one of the oldest ideas in the tradition: a coiled energy said to rest at the base of the spine, described in tantric and hatha texts centuries before any modern school. It runs through the roughly fourteenth-to-fifteenth-century Hatha Yoga Pradipika, through tantric works such as the Ṣaṭ-cakra-nirūpaṇa (rendered by Woodroffe as The Serpent Power), and across the Nath and Shakta lineages. Swami Satyananda’s Kundalini Tantra is the clearest modern account of that older material. Any twentieth-century “Kundalini Yoga” is a recent packaging of this far older tradition, not its origin.
Set sequences called kriyas, strong pranayama such as breath of fire, mantra and chanting, mudra and bandha, all aimed at raising energy through the body. It spends far more of its hour in breath, sound, and meditation than most postural styles.
Tuning in with mantra → warm-up and pranayama → a kriya, a fixed set of movement and breath toward one effect → deep relaxation → seated meditation with mantra → closing.
The version marketed in the West as “Kundalini Yoga as taught by Yogi Bhajan” was codified through his 3HO organization from 1969. He presented it as an ancient unbroken lineage, but that lineage has not been verified and does not map cleanly onto a single documented source. After his death, an independent investigation his own organization commissioned, the Olive Branch report of 2020, heard hundreds of accounts and concluded he more likely than not sexually abused followers, including minors, alongside financial exploitation. The energy the practice draws on is genuinely ancient; the man is not its origin. Many practitioners keep the techniques while parting from him and his institutions. I name this plainly and believe those who came forward.
A tantric "yogic sleep," systematized by Swami Satyananda Saraswati of the Bihar School of Yoga, who said he revised an older tantric teaching and brought it into practice around 1964. Richard Miller later adapted it into iRest, used clinically for trauma and with veterans.
Done lying down and awake: a settling, a sankalpa or intention, a systematic rotation of awareness through the body, breath awareness, and guided imagery, resting in a witnessing stillness. It is a practice of the senses turning inward more than a practice of postures.
Settle and relax the body → set a sankalpa → rotate awareness part by part → follow the breath → pairs of opposite sensations → imagery → return to the sankalpa and back.
A graft from outside the hatha line: Daoist yoga and Chinese-medicine meridian theory, brought into a Western anatomy frame.
A graft of Taoist yoga and Chinese-medicine meridian theory onto a Western anatomy frame. Paul Grilley synthesized Daoist yoga learned from Paulie Zink with the energetics of Hiroshi Motoyama; Sarah Powers, an early student, added a meditative Buddhist emphasis and helped spread the name Yin.
Long passive floor holds, commonly three to five minutes, meant to reach the deep connective tissue and joints rather than the muscles. Stillness and meridian theory frame the practice.
Butterfly, held long → Dragon lunge, each side → Caterpillar forward fold → Sphinx or Seal → a reclined twist, each side → Savasana. Five or six shapes fill the hour.
Recent forms that either braid several lineages together or work to open the practice to every body, regardless of age, ability, or condition.
An eclectic New York synthesis founded by Sharon Gannon and David Life in 1984, vinyasa-based and influenced by Ashtanga, with a strong scriptural and devotional overlay.
Five tenets carry the practice: ahimsa, nonviolence including vegetarianism and activism; bhakti, devotion; nada, sacred sound; dhyana, meditation; and shastra, scriptural study. A physically strong flow set inside an ethical frame.
Chair yoga was developed by Lakshmi Voelker, a Kripalu-trained teacher, from 1982, adapting hatha to a seated and supported form. The wider Accessible Yoga movement was founded by Jivana Heyman, who in 2007 created a teacher training so that people with disabilities could themselves become teachers, and whose books argue the practice belongs to every body. A second, older strand runs through Matthew Sanford, paralyzed from the chest down since a 1978 car accident and later the founder of the nonprofit Mind Body Solutions, who wrote the foreword to Heyman’s Accessible Yoga.
Postures, breath, and meditation adapted to a chair or to individual ability, so that age, disability, or illness is no barrier. As much a stance on equity in yoga as a set of shapes.
Sanford is worth reading in his own voice. In the foreword to Heyman’s Accessible Yoga he observes that asana “looks different when it travels through my paralyzed body,” while on the inside the poses are “forged with the timeless heart of yoga.” In his memoir Waking he sets the claim wider: the changing relationship between mind and body, he writes, is not his alone but “a defining feature of everyone’s life.” That is the position under this whole branch. It is not that every body can make the same shape, but that the inner work of a pose does not depend on the shape. Heyman and Sanford arrived by different roads, a difference Sanford names himself: Heyman began as a social activist during the AIDS crisis, while Sanford came to yoga after spinal injury and out of exhaustion with the Western medical model.
Not a distinct lineage but hatha yoga modified for pregnancy, shaped by many teachers rather than one founder.
Gentle, supported postures with props, breathing, and relaxation fitted to each trimester. Deep compression, lying flat on the back for long, and heated rooms are set aside.
Where the branches meet the limbs
Every style above carries a small row called Reaches toward. Those chips are the connection this section is about. A branch is a way of moving the body, and the limbs are the eight-fold path that body practice is meant to open onto. The chips name, for each style, which limbs it leans into most: some reach toward breath, some toward the inward turn of the senses, some toward the divine. Read them together and the tree stops being a list of studios and becomes a map of doorways into one house.
Look down the cooling end of the spectrum and something becomes clear. The quietest styles are where asana stops being exercise and becomes the next limb. In a long Yin hold or a fully supported Restorative pose, the senses draw inward on their own, and that inward turn is pratyahara. Yoga Nidra is almost pure pratyahara, practiced lying down. Kundalini spends most of its hour in breath and mantra, which are pranayama and the seed of dharana. The active styles have their own thresholds: the steady gaze, the drishti, of Ashtanga is a concentration practice, and the stillness at the end of any strong class is where dhyana can arrive.
The eight limbs are one map of yoga. The Bhagavad Gita draws an older one: not limbs but paths, the margas a life can walk. Karma yoga is the path of selfless action, jnana yoga the path of knowledge, raja yoga the meditative discipline that Patanjali sets out, and bhakti yoga the path of devotion. This page charts posture, so the paths sit underneath the tree rather than on it, but they surface wherever a style leans toward love and surrender rather than only toward the shape of the body. That is why Sivananda, Integral, Kundalini, Anusara, and Jivamukti each reach toward The Divine: they carry a devotional current, the path of bhakti, into a room full of postures. Bhakti, the yoga of devotion, is charted in full on The Divine.
So the styles are doors of different widths into the same house. Some come in through effort and heat, some through stillness and support, some through devotion, but the far rooms are shared: the drawing inward of the senses, the gathering of the mind, and the absorption the whole path is pointed at. Whichever branch you practice on, it is still the one tree, and its highest limbs are the same.