Yoga in America has a long history, foreshadowed in the 19th century by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and starting in earnest with Vivekananda's visit in 1893; he presented yoga as a spiritual path without asanas, very different from modern yoga as exercise. Two other early figures, however, Ida C. Craddock and Pierre Bernard, created their own interpretations of yoga, based on tantra and oriented to physical pleasure.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.
Henry David Thoreau was an American essayist, poet, and philosopher. A leading transcendentalist, Thoreau is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay "Civil Disobedience", an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.
An asana is a body posture, originally a sitting pose for meditation, and later in hatha yoga and modern yoga as exercise, adding reclining, standing, inverted, twisting, and balancing poses to the meditation seats. 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.
The practice of yoga as consisting mainly of physical postures began in 1919 when Yogendra brought his system, influenced by physical culture, to America. A large variety of asana systems evolved, including the precise Iyengar Yoga and Pattabhi Jois's energetic Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga and its Power Yoga spinoffs. Spiritual styles also flourished, including Transcendental Meditation and Integral Yoga. Despite this, yoga in America has largely detached from its religious roots, becoming part of the cosmopolitan "global popular".[1]
Physical culture is a health and strength training movement that originated during the 19th century in Germany, the UK and the US.
Iyengar Yoga, named after and developed by B. K. S. Iyengar, and described in his bestselling 1966 book Light on Yoga, is a form of yoga as exercise that has an emphasis on detail, precision and alignment in the performance of yoga postures (asanas).
Power Yoga is any of several forms of energetic vinyasa-style yoga as exercise developed in America in the 1990s. These include forms derived from Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga, namely those of Beryl Bender Birch and of Bryan Kest, and forms derived from Bikram Yoga, such as that of Baron Baptiste.
Long before yoga arrived in America, pioneering thinkers began to assimilate Indian thought.[2] Among the first was the poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1857, he published a poem, Brahma, in the first issue of literary magazine The Atlantic Monthly, which he had helped to found. The work contained the lines "I am the doubter and the doubt, I am the hymn the Brahmin sings."[3] Emerson was expressing the Hindu philosophy of non-duality, Advaita. He had studied among other Hindu scriptures the Bhagavad Gita, in which Krishna instructs Arjuna in yoga. Emerson was mercilessly mocked, and 26 parodies of the poem were published within a month of its appearance. But America was starting to think about its relationship to eastern philosophy.[3]Henry David Thoreau, too, read translations of Hindu texts, quoting frequently from the Bhagavad Gita, and attempted meditation during his ascetic life – itself an indication of how strongly he was influenced by those texts – in the forest at Walden. Stefanie Syman argues that he deserved the title of Yogi.[4] Another pioneer was Madame Blavatsky, co-founder in 1875 of The Theosophical Society in New York, her philosophy blending several Asian traditions. She repeatedly stressed the importance of Patanjali's system of yoga, before travelling to India and Ceylon and dramatically converting to Buddhism.[5][6]
The Bhagavad Gita, often referred to as the Gita, is a 700-verse Sanskrit scripture that is part of the Hindu epic Mahabharata.
Krishna is a major deity in Hinduism. He is worshipped as the eighth avatar of the god Vishnu and also as the supreme God in his own right. He is the god of compassion, tenderness, and love in Hinduism, and is one of the most popular and widely revered among Indian divinities. Krishna's birthday is celebrated every year by Hindus on Krishna Janmashtami according to the lunisolar Hindu calendar, which falls in late August or early September of the Gregorian calendar. Krishna is usually depicted with a flute in his hand.
Arjuna is a central character of the ancient Indian epic Mahabharata. Arjuna was the son of Pandu in the Kuru Kingdom. In a previous birth he was a saint named Nara who was the lifelong companion of another saint, Narayana, an incarnation of Lord Vishnu who took rebirth as Lord Krishna. He was the third of the Pandava brothers and was married to Draupadi, Ulupi, Chitrāngadā, and Subhadra at different times. His children included Srutakarma, Iravan, Babruvahana, and Abhimanyu. Arjuna's daughters with Draupadi were Pragati and Pragya.
Swami Vivekananda brought yoga to America in 1893, but rejected the practice of asanas.
In 1893, Swami Vivekananda gave several lectures at the Chicago World Parliament of Religions.[7] The event effectively marked the start of yoga in America, and the birth of modern yoga as a transnational movement. It was followed in 1896 by his popular book, Raja Yoga.[8][9] He taught a mixture of yoga breathwork (pranayama), meditation, and the distinctively Western idea of positive thinking, derived from the new thought movement. Like other high-caste Hindus and British colonial officers in India at the time, he explicitly rejected the practice of asanas and hatha yoga.[10]
Swami Vivekananda, born Narendranath Datta, was an Indian Hindu monk, a chief disciple of the 19th-century Indian mystic Ramakrishna. He was a key figure in the introduction of the Indian philosophies of Vedanta and Yoga to the Western world and is credited with raising interfaith awareness, bringing Hinduism to the status of a major world religion during the late 19th century. He was a major force in the revival of Hinduism in India, and contributed to the concept of nationalism in colonial India. Vivekananda founded the Ramakrishna Math and the Ramakrishna Mission. He is perhaps best known for his speech which began with the words - "Sisters and brothers of America ...," in which he introduced Hinduism at the Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago in 1893.
Yoga is a group of physical, mental, and spiritual practices or disciplines which originated in ancient India. Yoga is one of the six orthodox schools of Hindu philosophical traditions. There is a broad variety of yoga schools, practices, and goals in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. The term "yoga" in the Western world often denotes a modern form of Hatha yoga, yoga as exercise, consisting largely of the postures called asanas.
Modern yoga consists of a range of techniques including asanas (postures) and meditation derived from some of the philosophies, teachings and practices of Hinduism, and organised into a wide variety of schools and denominations. It has been described by Elizabeth de Michelis as having four types, namely: Modern Psychosomatic Yoga, as in The Yoga Institute; Modern Denominational Yoga, as in Brahma Kumaris; Modern Postural Yoga, as in Iyengar Yoga; and Modern Meditational Yoga, as in early Transcendental Meditation. The yoga scholar Mark Singleton however does not subscribe to De Michelis's framework, considering the categories to "subsume detail, variation, and exception". In the 21st-century, modern yoga has become the subject of academic study.
Ida C. Craddock became interested in yoga and tantra late in the 19th century, a time when Americans were questioning Christian orthodoxy while others were struggling to uphold it. As a woman, and the creator of a system of techniques to enhance sexual pleasure, she came under attack. Among her sources was the Shiva Samhita and its account of Vajroli mudra, involving delayed ejaculation and the practised uptake of sexual fluids through the penis. She further enraged religious fundamentalists by asserting that God was a third partner in a sacralized sexual union, and in 1899 by creating a Church of Yoga. She was convicted and imprisoned in New York in 1902 for obscenity and blasphemy. The yoga scholar Andrea Jain comments that this marked the start of a split between a modern, physical yoga that celebrated the body, and a more traditional meditative practice that, like Vivekananda's yoga, essentially shunned it.[11]
Tantra denotes the esoteric traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism that co-developed most likely about the middle of the 1st millennium AD. The term tantra, in the Indian traditions, also means any systematic broadly applicable "text, theory, system, method, instrument, technique or practice".
Shiva Samhita is a Sanskrit text on yoga, written by an unknown author. The text is addressed by the Hindu god Shiva to his consort Parvati. The text consists of five chapters, with the first chapter a treatise that summarizes nondual Vedanta philosophy with influences from the Sri Vidya school of South India. The remaining chapters discuss yoga, the importance of a guru (teacher) to a student, various asanas, mudras and siddhis (powers) attainable with yoga and tantra.
Vajroli mudra, the Vajroli Seal, is a practice in Hatha yoga which requires the yogin to preserve his semen, either by learning not to release it, or if released by drawing it up through his urethra from the vagina of "a woman devoted to the practice of yoga".
Another controversial figure, Pierre Bernard, brought yoga to the notice of a suspicious American public, but despite persecution managed to attract a modest following of eccentrics, including his nephew Theos Bernard. He learnt yoga from a tantric yogi, Sylvais Hamati, a man of mixed descent who had managed to reach Lincoln, Nebraska, apparently from Calcutta. Hamati taught Bernard a combination of asanas including lotus position and headstand, purifications (shatkarmas) including dhauti, and breath control (pranayama). In a celebrated exploit, he used his skill in pranayama to simulate death (Kali mudra): a physician, in front of a crowd of witnesses, was unable to feel his pulse. Bernard and Hamati created a Tantrik Order, shrouded in an exciting degree of secrecy, with seven levels of initiation involving mantras, asanas, pranayama, and doctrine.[12][13] Offended onlookers described it as "lust, mummery, and black magic".[12] Eventually in 1918 Bernard moved to Nyack, New York, creating an "esoteric country club for 'Tantriks'" supported by wealthy backers including some of the Vanderbilts. Club members learnt hatha yoga, which Bernard assured them would increase their enjoyment of life's pleasures, and were treated to "opulent circuses" and other entertainments.[13]
Pierre Arnold Bernard — known as "The Great Oom", "The Omnipotent Oom" and "Oom the Magnificent" — was a pioneering American yogi, scholar, occultist, philosopher, mystic and businessman.
Lincoln is the capital of the U.S. state of Nebraska and the county seat of Lancaster County. The city covers 96.194 square miles (249.141 km2) with a population of 287,401 in 2018. It is the second-most populous city in Nebraska and the 70th-largest in the United States. The city is the economic and cultural anchor of a substantially-larger metropolitan area in the southeastern part of the state called the Lincoln Metropolitan and Lincoln-Beatrice Combined Statistical Areas. The statistical area is home to 356,083 people, making it the 105th-largest combined statistical area in the United States.
Lotus position or Padmasana is a cross-legged sitting asana originating in meditative practices of ancient India, in which each foot is placed on the opposite thigh. It is an ancient asana, predating hatha yoga, and is commonly used for meditation, in the Yoga, Hindu, Tantra, Jain, and Buddhist contemplative traditions.
Yoga asanas were brought to America in 1919 by Yogendra, sometimes called "the Father of the Modern Yoga Renaissance", his system influenced by the physical culture of Max Müller; his Yoga Institute of America in Harriman, New York, operated for a few years.[14]
In 1943, Theos Bernard published his Hatha Yoga: The Report of a Personal Experience. It presented hatha yoga as a complex, difficult practice requiring serious commitment, and was the first to include a set of high-quality photographs of some 30 asanas.[7][18]
Indra Devi's 1959 Yoga for Americans encouraged women to practise at home. On the cover (top left), she wears her characteristic sari.
In 1961, Richard Hittleman launched his yoga television show, Yoga for Health, enabling him to sell millions of copies of his books on yoga. He carefully minimised yoga's esoteric aspects such as kundalini and the subtle body, though personally he believed the goal of yoga was indeed "pure bliss consciousness".[20] Both the show and the books presented yoga to a wide audience across America.[7][21][20] Other yoga television shows followed, including Lilias Folan's WCET series Lilias, Yoga and You!, which ran from the 1970s to the 1990s, helping to make yoga acceptable to the public throughout the country.[22][23]
In 1958, Swami Vishnudevananda came to San Francisco, going on to found the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centres worldwide, with its headquarters in Montreal, Canada. His 1960 The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga was the first major illustrated guide, showing and describing some 90 yoga asanas and numerous variations in 146 monochrome plates, many of them full-page.[7][24][25]
In 1966, another of Krishnamacharya's pupils, his brother-in-law B.K.S. Iyengar, published his influential Light on Yoga, with unprecedentedly precise descriptions and illustrations of some 200 asanas in 600 monochrome photographs.[7][26] His student Mary Dunn helped to set up the Iyengar Yoga Institute in San Francisco in 1978, and then the Iyengar Yoga Association of New York.[27]
Also in 1966, Amrit Desai began to teach yoga in Pennsylvania. He named his organisation the Kripalu Yoga Fellowship in 1974; it opened its current centre in Massachusetts in 1983, from where it teaches its own form of yoga, combining asanas, pranayama, and meditation.[7][28][29]
Yet another of Krishnamacharya's pupils, K. Pattabhi Jois, came to America in 1975, starting a long-lasting craze in the country for Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga.[30] A vinyasa is a movement that connects yoga poses together; the result is a continuously flowing sequence that can be learnt and practised as a whole, making yoga into an energetic aerobic exercise.[30][31][32] Also in 1975, Yoga Journal published its first issue.[7] Ashtanga Yoga gave rise to various spinoff styles including Power Yoga in the 1990s,[33] with one form created in 1995 by Beryl Bender Birch[34][35][36] and others by Bryan Kest, a student of K. Pattabhi Jois, and Baron Baptiste, trained in the hot style of Bikram Yoga.[37]Bikram Choudhury arrived in the United States in 1971, and by 1974 had created his own style of yoga, with the studios heated to 105°F (41°C). He was strongly charismatic, had been taught yoga by B. C. Ghosh, Yogananda's youngest brother, and like Jois saw hatha yoga as a religion.[38] The two men made yoga serious, hard work, with an intensity that demanded a lifestyle arranged around yoga; up to that point, it had been seen as a slow, gentle, feminine form of exercise, and classes had consisted mainly of women. Practice was so hot and sweaty, and required such mobility, that clothing was reduced to a new minimum: men often wore nothing but long shorts, while women wore footless leggings, sports bras, and small tank tops.[39]
From 1918, Pierre Bernard and his wife Blanche DeVries ran yoga studios for women, offering a combination of spiritual practices including tantra, traditional Indian medicine, and Vedic philosophy. They influenced American perception of yoga for the next century, combining athleticism, the exotic, sexuality, and a willingness to separate religious practices from their source religions.[12][40][41][42]
American yoga again took a turn towards the spiritual in the 1960s. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi spread his Transcendental Meditation across America in the 1960s, and then worldwide.[7][43]Swami Satchidananda came to America in 1966, founding the Integral Yoga institute in Virginia, and in 1969 opening the Woodstock festival.[7][44] A Harvard professor, Richard Alpert, travelled to India as a pilgrim. He came back to America as a guru named Ram Dass, and in 1970 toured America's university campuses, encouraging a lifestyle of spiritual search, supported by his book Be Here Now.[7][45]
In 1975, Judith Hanson Lasater and others founded Yoga Journal; from small beginnings it became American yoga's journal of record.[46][47] In the 1970s and 1980s, however, yoga was seen by Americans largely as just another form of exercise, alongside aerobics and jogging, and it was practised by a small minority. Its image changed when in 1989 Sharon Gannon and David Life opened a New York studio for their explicitly spiritual Jivamukti Yoga. Asanas were practised in front of images of deities, accompanied by music.[48] By 2009, Lisa Miller could write in Newsweek "We [Americans] are all Hindus now".[49] She quoted the scholar of religion Stephen Prothero's description of America's "divine-deli-cafeteria religion", where people feel free to pick and mix yoga, Catholicism, and Buddhist retreats, if the combination works for them.[49] The historian Catherine Albanese argues that American metaphysicals have constructed a "new and American yogic product" in which the body itself is a vessel for the spirit.[50] The journalist Stefanie Syman notes that effortful yoga has a Protestant streak, as it is both "an indulgence and a penance."[51][52]
Cosmopolitan yoga
Yoga commercialised: a store in Connecticut, 2013, with yoga clothing and poster
By 2016, according to an Ipsos study, 36.7 million Americans were practising yoga, making the business of classes, clothing and equipment worth $16 billion, compared to $10 billion in 2012. Some 72 percent of practitioners were women.[53]
The historian Jared Farmer noted that if the yoga-practising population were a religious group, they would easily exceed the number of American Hindus, Muslims, atheists, Mormons, and Jews put together.[54] He identifies 12 general trends in yoga's history in America from the 1890s to the 21st century:
peripheral to central; local to global; male to (predominantly) female; spiritual to (mostly) secular; sectarian to universal; mendicant to consumerist; meditational to postural; intellectual to experiential; esoteric to accessible; oral to hands-on teaching; textual to photographic representations of poses; contorted social pariahs to lithe social winners.[55]
Considering all these trends, Farmer stated that modern yoga as exercise belonged to Srinivas Aravamudan's category of the "global popular",[55] which Farmer glossed as "a postcolonial realm of religious cosmopolitanism."[55]
In Lasater's view, yoga in America in the 21st century has lost "the gentleness, consistency, and direction of the practice",[56] replaced by ambition. Lasater believes that many Americans "have conflated asana with yoga."[56]
Haṭha yoga is a branch of yoga. The Sanskrit word हठ haṭha literally means "force" and thus alludes to a system of physical techniques.
K. Pattabhi Jois was an Indian yoga teacher and Sanskrit scholar who developed and popularized the vinyāsa style of yoga referred to as Ashtanga Yoga. In 1948, Jois established the Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute in Mysore, India. Pattabhi Jois is one of a short list of Indians instrumental in establishing modern yoga as exercise in the 20th century, along with B. K. S. Iyengar and Indra Devi, both like Jois pupils of Krishnamacharya in Mysore.
Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga is a style of yoga as exercise created by K. Pattabhi Jois during the 20th century, often promoted as a modern-day form of classical Indian yoga. The style is hot and energetic, synchronising breath with movements. The individual poses (asanas) are linked by flowing movements (vinyasas).
Prāṇāyāma is the practice of breath control in yoga. In modern yoga as exercise, it consists of synchronising the breath with movements between asanas, in texts like the Bhagavad Gita and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, and later in Hatha yoga texts, it meant the complete cessation of breathing.
Uttanasana or Standing Forward Bend, with variants such as Padahastasana where the toes are grasped, is a standing forward bending asana in modern yoga as exercise.
Hanumanasana or Monkey Pose is a seated asana in modern yoga as exercise. It is the yoga version of the front splits.
Bryan Kest is an American yoga teacher. Recognized as the creator of one form of Power Yoga, he is the founder of Santa Monica Power Yoga, based in Santa Monica, California. Kest has led yoga classes, retreats and workshops worldwide. He is credited with pioneering the practice of donation-based yoga in the United States.
Upaviṣṭa Koṇāsana, also written Upavistha Konasana or "wide-angle seated forward bend" is an asana in modern yoga as exercise, sitting upright with the legs as wide apart as possible, grasping the toes and leaning forward.
R. Sharath Jois is a teacher, practitioner and lineage holder (paramaguru) of Ashtanga Yoga, in the tradition of his grandfather K. Pattabhi Jois. He is the director of the Shri K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute (KPJAYI), formerly Ashtanga Yoga Research Insttitue (AYRI)), in Mysore, India. He is an author, the subject of several documentaries, and is known for his expertise in Ashtanga yoga.
Prasārita Pādottānāsana or Wide Stance Forward Bend is a standing forward bend asana in modern yoga as exercise.
Yoga as exercise is a physical activity consisting mainly of postures (asanas), often connected by flowing sequences called vinyasas, sometimes accompanied by rhythmic breathing (pranayama), and often ending with relaxation or meditation. Yoga in this form has become familiar across the world, especially in America and Europe. It is derived from medieval Haṭha yoga, and is sometimes so named, but it is generally simply called "yoga". This is despite the existence of multiple older traditions of yoga within Hinduism dating back to the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, some not involving asanas at all, and despite the fact that in no tradition was the practice of asanas central. Academics have given yoga as exercise a variety of names, including modern postural yoga, modern transnational yoga, and transnational anglophone yoga.
Yoga Makaranda, meaning "Essence of Yoga", is a 1934 book on hatha yoga by the influential pioneer of yoga as exercise, Tirumalai Krishnamacharya. Most of the text is a description of 42 asanas accompanied by 95 photographs of Krishnamacharya and his students executing the poses. There is a brief account of other Haṭha yoga practices, asanas forming just one of the eight limbs of classical yoga, that Krishnamacharya "did not instruct his students to practice".
Hatha Yoga: The Report of a Personal Experience is a 1943 book by Theos Casimir Bernard describing what he learnt of hatha yoga while in India. It is one of the first books in English to describe and illustrate a substantial number of yoga poses (asanas); it describes the yoga purifications (shatkarmas), yoga breathing (pranayama), yogic seals (mudras), and meditative union (samadhi) at a comparable level of detail.
The Path of Modern Yoga: The History of an Embodied Spiritual Practice is a 2016 history of the modern practice of postural yoga by the yoga scholar Elliott Goldberg. It focuses in detail on eleven pioneering figures of the transformation of yoga in the 20th century, including Yogendra, Kuvalayananda, Pant Pratinidhi, Krishnamacharya, B. K. S. Iyengar and Indra Devi.
The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America is a 2010 book on the history of yoga as exercise by the American journalist Stefanie Syman. It spans the period from the first precursors of American yoga, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau, the arrival of Vivekananda, the role of Hollywood with Indra Devi, the hippie generation, and the leaders of a revived but now postural yoga such as Bikram Choudhury and Pattabhi Jois.
Yoga in Britain is the practice of yoga, especially yoga as exercise consisting mainly of the postures called asanas, in Britain, beginning early in the 20th century. Before then, yoga was known only from the reports of travellers to India, which painted a picture of deceptive vagabonds pretending to be pious. Among the first to publicise yoga in Britain was the occultist Aleister Crowley, who confused yoga with magic in the public mind. Instructors such as Mary Bagot Stack taught postures similar to several modern asanas to women in Britain between the world wars, but these were not then described as yoga.
Albanese, Catherine (2007). A republic of mind and spirit: a cultural history of American metaphysical religion. Yale University Press. ISBN978-0-300-13615-9. OCLC191732654.
Goldberg, Philip (2013). American Veda: from Emerson and the Beatles to yoga and meditation--how Indian spirituality changed the West. Three Rivers Press. ISBN978-0-385-52135-2. OCLC808413359.
Laycock, Joseph (2013). "Yoga for the New Woman and the New Man: The Role of Pierre Bernard and Blanche DeVries in the Creation of Modern Postural Yoga". Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation. 23 (1): 101–136. doi:10.1525/rac.2013.23.1.101. JSTOR10.1525/rac.2013.23.1.101.
Love, Robert (2010). The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America. Viking. ISBN978-0670021758.
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