I am not in a position to actually help, but I can provide my opinion.

This is a very serious consideration for us. However, even if the history of yoga is relevant it is not necessarily easy for a conscientious and genuine teacher to directly pilot students endeavors, as this may contravene their learning, that learning is sometimes only effective from experience.

Many great yogis have come from India to the West in bygone days, having amassed lifetime worth of yoga austerities and experiences, they decided the times were ripe to take it to the world stage. As we are aware (in spite of their advancements) they simply had to formulate an acceptable presentation of yoga. The Westerners on account of their environment and living circumstances can only appreciate a certain format of austerities, which is limited to just the semblance of some effort.

By your post we can easily appreciate the frustration and even implied agony this must have been for many of these great souls. The position presented from the mass of students is not dependent on those elevated teachers but is dictated by the environment, time and circumstances. In that sense, India or being Indian does not place one at any advantage (generally speaking).

The pockets of human societies that remain clinging to old lifestyles come to mind. We wouldn’t allow a “regression” to transportation on baggy horses like the Amish or Quaker communities. Transportation now is a different concept altogether. In the same way it is normal and natural for all others to resist or refute a presentation of yoga that implies even in faint ways some presentation of the subtle reality.

This serious yoga is different from even what sadhus are doing walking or sleeping on nails or living on one limb… it is also different to anything a Westerner is normally about. We are gradually transitioning to accepting the subtle reality and switching it for this most concrete, grossest, most comforting and stable even if transient reality. This yoga is counter-intuitive, and intuitively a death sentence.

I would be concerned and challenged to see that the masses take to anything that points to the real light beyond the apparent darkness, because as far they are concerned that is certain death. As the end justifies the means, IMO the yoga they practice and teach in the West fits the bill (pun intended), with that physical yoga they draw some beneficial outward immediate and tangible results.

The time will come for us all on the path to grapple with these very questions you raise, and we shall have to reveal to ourselves the appropriate answers only over time. Lord Buddha’s own legacy very quickly degenerated in different presentations of salvation, which invariably involved diffuse generalized warm fuzzy result oriented compassion or zenified mind or even traditional spirit worship methodologies. The true ones turn to the forest or some cave.

Finally, it may be that we are dealing with semantics only. Just because both say yoga, doesn’t have to mean the same thing, until the day a magnanimous one is able to convert on a relatively large scale the definition and practice of yoga. However, such times were not ideal even in the golden age of yoga; there were still fragmentation and falsehood. It will always remain a conundrum to reconcile two separate realities or dimensions. We all look like we are doing the same thing, but one is existentially and wholly plugged into this world and the other isn’t.