In 1995, the last time internationally recognized yoga expert Suraj Karan Jindel visited the United States, he was disappointed in how he saw the discipline being taught.

“I think (students) are not properly guided in the principles of yoga,” said Jindel, 80, of Jaipur, India, a practitioner for some 70 years. He made his observation while visiting yoga classes in Chautauqua, N.Y., and Toledo, Ohio. “They are doing it different.

“It’s not the poses,” he added. “The poses are countless numbers. It’s the way they’re doing them.”

And that way is speed.

“Yoga is steadiness, not speed,” Jindel said. “It is slow action into the pose and retain the pose like a rock and then returning without a jerk. They probably have mixed yoga with other exercises.”

In India, yoga is practiced in unlit rooms, without mirrors or music, so the students can focus internally rather than on a reflection or some other distraction in the room.

“The aim is to center on your own internal body,” Jindel said. “Keep your eyes closed, look inward, watch yourself. Yoga is the joining of two things, the body and mind. Without doing that you can’t have success in any of your work.”

Jindel is a walking poster for the benefits of yoga. He has the body of a man in his 40s or 50s and has had to seek medical treatment only twice over his lifespan — once for surgery on a boil and once for a broken ankle sustained when a three-wheeled vehicle loaded with tables ran over a foot.

Already in his 70s, he only took 15 days off from yoga after the fracture, and he can twist and turn the ankle into amazing positions, just as always.

Suraj Karan Jindel, 80, of Jaipur, India, performs 'Garbhasan,' or 'a child in mother's womb posture,' a difficult posture aimed at overall flexibility of the body and the relief of constipation.

Yoga offers numerous medicinal poses, including practices to treat diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity — even, Jindel said, “to turn an obstinate boy into a mild one.”

Jindel, frequently invited to international yoga conferences, has first-hand experience with the latter because he volunteers as a teacher of inmates at Jaipur Central Jail, a maximum-security facility for the worst criminals of the state of Rajasthan. A few of the inmates have become such disciplined students of yoga that they have been released, he said.

The yogi does one pose that confounds observers. It involves two abdominal muscles that run vertically down the body from the ribs. Though they normally work in conjunction, he can work each muscle separately.