An āsana is a body posture, originally and still a general term for a sitting meditation pose, and later extended in hatha yoga and modern yoga as exercise, to any type of position, adding reclining, standing, inverted, twisting, and balancing poses. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali define "asana" as "[a position that] is steady and comfortable". Patanjali mentions the ability to sit for extended periods as one of the eight limbs of his system. Asanas are also called yoga poses or yoga postures in English.
Jennifer Anne Saville is a contemporary British painter and an original member of the Young British Artists. Saville works and lives in Oxford, England and she is known for her large-scale painted depictions of nude women. Saville has been credited with originating a new and challenging method of painting the female nude and reinventing figure painting for contemporary art. Some paintings are of small dimensions, while other are of much larger scale. Monumental subjects come from pathology textbooks that she has studied that informed her on injury to bruise, burns, and deformity. John Gray commented: "As I see it, Jenny Saville's work expresses a parallel project of reclaiming the body from personality. Saville worked with many models who under went cosmetic surgery to reshape a portion of their body. In doing that, she captures "marks of personality for the flesh" and together embraces how we can be the writers of our own lives."
Naked yoga is the practice of yoga without clothes. It has existed since ancient times as a spiritual practice, and is mentioned in the 7th-10th century Bhagavata Purana and by the Ancient Greek geographer Strabo.
Bernarr Macfadden was an American proponent of physical culture, a combination of bodybuilding with nutritional and health theories. He founded the long-running magazine publishing company Macfadden Publications.
The Aphrodite of Knidos was an Ancient Greek sculpture of the goddess Aphrodite created by Praxiteles of Athens around the 4th century BC. It was one of the first life-sized representations of the nude female form in Greek history, displaying an alternative idea to male heroic nudity. Praxiteles' Aphrodite was shown nude, reaching for a bath towel while covering her pubis, which, in turn leaves her breasts exposed. Up until this point, Greek sculpture had been dominated by male nude figures. The original Greek sculpture is no longer in existence; however, many Roman copies survive of this influential work of art. Variants of the Venus Pudica are the Venus de' Medici and the Capitoline Venus.
Milo Milton Hastings was an American inventor, author, and nutritionist. He invented the forced-draft chicken incubator and Weeniwinks, a health-food snack. He wrote about chickens, science fiction, and health, among other things. Some of his writing is available in book form and on Project Gutenberg. Hastings was married twice and had three children.
Yoga Journal is a website and digital journal, formerly a print magazine, on yoga as exercise founded in California in 1975 with the goal of combining the essence of traditional yoga with scientific understanding. It has produced live events and materials such as DVDs on yoga and related subjects.
Lotte Herrlich (1883–1956) was a German photographer. She is regarded as the most important female photographer of the German naturism. This mainly was during the 1920s, in which the Freikörperkultur was popular within Germany, before the Nazi Party assumed power (1930s), promptly prohibiting it.
Yin Yoga is slow-paced style of yoga, incorporating principles of traditional Chinese medicine, with asanas (postures) that are held for longer periods of time than in other styles. Advanced practitioners may stay in one asana for five minutes or more. The sequences of postures are meant to stimulate the channels of the subtle body known as meridians in Chinese medicine and as nadis in Hatha yoga.
Marguerite Diane Webber, was an American model, dancer and actress.
Carolyn Cowan is a London-based yoga and breathwork teacher and psychosexual and relationship therapist. Prior to her career as a therapist, she was a fashion designer and photographer. During the 1980s, she earned acclaim as a makeup artist in the pop music video industry. She taught body painting at the University of the Arts London for over 20 years. Most recently (2019) Carolyn founded and launched a new form of yoga, Kundalini Global, in answer to the rapidly growing and profound need for yoga to become more inclusive and serve a wider demographic.
Gertrud Leistikow was a German dancer and choreographer. She is primarily associated with nude and Grotesque dance.
The Mensendieck System is a therapeutic teaching methodology for female physical education claimed to be both corrective and preventive. It was developed by Bess Mensendieck, who was an American physician and gymnastics teacher of Dutch descent. She is one of the most important founders of early breathing and physical pedagogy in Europe and America.
Mary Bagot Stack, known as Mollie Bagot Stack, founded the Women's League of Health & Beauty in 1930, the first and most significant mass keep-fit system of the 1930s in the UK. This has continued as an exercise system into the 21st century.
Modern yoga is a wide range of yoga practices with differing purposes, encompassing in its various forms yoga philosophy derived from the Vedas, physical postures derived from Hatha yoga, devotional and tantra-based practices, and Hindu nation-building approaches.
Joseph S. Alter is an American medical anthropologist known for his research into the modern practice of yoga as exercise, his 2004 book Yoga in Modern India, and the physical and medical culture of South Asia.
The history of yoga in the United States begins in the 19th century, with the philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau; Emerson's poem "Brahma" states the Hindu philosophy behind yoga. More widespread interest in yoga can be dated to the Hindu leader Vivekananda's visit from India in 1893; he presented yoga as a spiritual path without postures (asanas), very different from modern yoga as exercise. Two other early figures, however, the women's rights advocate Ida C. Craddock and the businessman and occultist Pierre Bernard, created their own interpretations of yoga, based on tantra and oriented to physical pleasure.
John de Mirjian was an Armenian American glamour photographer based in New York, famous for his images of celebrities, sometimes in risque poses. His brother Arto de Mirjian continued the business after John's early death.
William Richard Cunningham Latson was an American physician, occultist, physical culturist and vegetarian.
Carrica Le Favre was an American physical culturist, dress reform advocate and vegetarianism activist. She founded the Chicago Vegetarian Society and the New York Vegetarian Society.
