The Invention of Modern Yoga
By Eric Vandenbroeck
The Yoga
Alliance reported that yoga's 2020 revenue in the U.S.
alone was around $11.56 billion by 2020 and is increasing in popularity (with
few people knowing its actual history).
Recently also the
links between right-wing extremism and New Age wellness circles have become
increasingly evident, as fissures appeared during the pandemic among wellness
influencers on social media over the effect of conspiracy theories.
As new
reporting indicates, QAnon among others, has infiltrated L.A.’s wellness circles
during the pandemic to an even greater degree than previously known. According to
the Los Angeles Times,
“several” New Age spiritualists knew more than a dozen people from yoga,
meditation, and other circles who traveled to Washington D.C. to participate in
the Capitol riot. Some of the participants had been encouraged to promote
controversial ideas as a way to build a social media following, either to
launch a channel or endure during a pandemic that precluded many in-person
classes and events.
Primed by nearly a
year of rallying
against the
science-based understanding of the novel coronavirus, including promoting a
video that claimed a “shadowy cabal” of scientists and companies were linked to
the rise of the virus, many in the wellness community were especially
susceptible to the kinds of theories that fomented the insurrectionists.
Underpinned by a belief in alternative therapies, spiritualists and wellness
influencers have long embraced special access to informal knowledge and a
distrust of authority.
While experts in
online extremism and disinformation say it's hard to conclude if this trend is
on the rise within yoga, its presence is being documented.
Influencers like
Stephanie Birch have been criticized for mixing QAnon-related
hashtags like #greatawakening with yoga content and inspirational quotes.
"We are
experiencing a spiritual warfare against mastery manipulating puppets that go
back years," she writes in one Instagram post, featuring a picture of a
blue sky. The post has since been deleted:
The Centre for
Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) study found that influencers with "anti-vax
views" - including those within the yoga community - have gained nearly
eight million followers since 2019. In all, 31 million people follow
anti-vaccine groups on Facebook, and another 17 million subscribe to similar
accounts on YouTube. The CCDH estimates that the movement is worth $1bn in
advertising revenue for social media firms.
However, what could
be the case is that Yoga and New Age thinking has always been a
breeding ground for conspiracy theories. To understand this, it is
good to start with the history of how Yoga came to the West:
Not unlike what I recently explained in the case of modern Ayurveda also modern yoga, as pointed out by such
expert historians like Suzanne
Newcombe of the University of Cambridge, in her 2004 A
History of Modern Yoga, Karl
Baier from the University of Vienna and Faculty of History at the
University of Cambridge and detailed in a 2010 breakthrough book by Mark
Singleton, evolved in a discursive milieu that incorporates such disparate
strands as Hindu religion, occultism,
new thought, and gymnastics.
Thus in the course of
the past decades, also so-called kuṇḍalinī yoga has
pervaded popular culture and alternative religion. However, its popular
construction arose from a multi-layered process of re-interpretation,
originating in its initial exposure by non-Indian actors.
For example,
commonly, Sir John Woodroffe is credited with the dissemination of this Tantric
concept among devotees of European and American alternative religions. Yet,
Woodroffe had built upon earlier discussions on the part of the Theosophical
Society. Especially the (early) 1880s witnessed a vital discourse on Tantra and
some of its central components, such as kuṇḍalinī. In
an Orientalist manner, members of the Theosophical Society aimed to appropriate
Tantric concepts, in order to integrate them in their spiritual repertoire,
whereby the mysterious kuṇḍalinī energy was one among
many Tantric concepts that had aroused the Society’s interest. In the course of
time, kuṇḍalinī became a substantial content within
their religious program. As one of the earliest English references to kuṇḍalinī, the seminal text The Dream of Ravan constitutes the starting point of that discourse and
triggered ensuing Theosophical concepts. Among the members of the Theosophical
Society, the journal The Theosophist was the foremost medium of communication,
wherefore its contributions provide valuable insights into that vivid
discussion.
Most recently pointed
out by Borayin Larios and Mark Singleton,
this time in the authoritative Handbook of Yoga and Meditation (2020),
within the category of early scholar-practitioners of yoga, we must include
scholars affiliated with spiritual and religious organizations producing
translations and commentaries on yoga texts in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. "Probably the most significant of these organizations is the
Theosophical Society, founded by H. P. Blavatsky and Henry Olcott in 1875, which
published many early translations and commentaries on Patañjali’s
Yogasūtras as well as some of the earliest
translations of haṭhayoga texts."1
Theosophists stressed
the need for initiation and ‘traditional’ knowledge, meaning that esoteric
wisdom cannot simply be accessed and understood by a medium but requires a
learned preparation in esoteric teachings and the means to decipher them. India
came to be regarded as the treasure trove of ancient
‘Aryan’ wisdom that held that required key to occultism. Behind that idea
stood the orientalist discovery of the relationship between Sanskrit and
European languages, theories about the origins of religion and ‘myths,’ and
received an increasingly biological connotation towards the end of the century.
In this context, Yogic and meditational practices were at the core of
Theosophical interest in that supposed traditional ‘Aryan’ wisdom. As a result,
Theosophists gave yoga unprecedented global attention that formed the basis for
later developments in the twentieth century and New Age culture.
A major factor here
was the Theosophical concern for new editions and translations of Sanskrit and
vernacular texts: readers will find that Theosophical publishing houses printed
many contemporary editions and studies. In 1883, Rajendralal
Mitra wrote in the translation of The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali that no
pandit in Bengal had made yoga the special subject of his studies,
demonstrating the relative lack of interest of western-educated Indians in
yoga. Mirroring missionary and orientalist polemics, yoga was often regarded as
superstitious, barbaric, and dangerous. Not least, thanks to the Theosophists,
this attitude was beginning to change. One year before Mitra, the Indian
Theosophist Tukaram Tatya (1836–1898) had published
James R. Ballantyne’s translation of the first and second chapters of the Yogasūtra, combined with Govindaram
Sastri’s translation of the third and fourth chapters
that had been published in the journal Pandit. This book, called The Yoga
Philosophy, was thus the first English edition of the whole of Patañjali’s text. Its introduction was written by Olcott,
who explicitly identified
yoga with the occultist technique of self-mesmerization.
A second enhanced version was published in 1886, and a revised, more accessible
version in 1889 by the leading US-American Theosophist and co-founder William
Quan Judge (1851–1896).
How Yoga came to the West
The Theosophical
occupation with yoga can be observed as early as the inception of the flagship
journal, The Theosophist, in an article about ‘Yoga Vidya’ from October
1879 until January 1880. Therein, yoga is discussed in the light of Mesmerism
and Spiritualism, with references to the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and the English translation of the Yogasūtra from Pandit. The year 1880 also marks the first
engagement with tantra, which set the stage for a Theosophical reception of kuṇḍalinī, the chakras,
and related yogic concepts that remain influential up to the present day.
In what follows, this first encounter with tantra will be put in the context of
the western esoteric reception of yoga and meditation, focusing on selecting
key concepts and the role of Indian authors in their transmission into a
western alternative religious culture.
Not only did the
Theosophical Society produce texts, but its reading rooms and distribution
houses provided a place for broad religious explorations; its speaking forums
allowed specific Indian individuals to more easily promote their own teachings
of yoga. And as De Michelis has argued in A
History of Modern Yoga, for example, Swami Vivekananda’s invitation for
Americans and Europeans to identify with Indian yoga was made in a
Theosophically saturated milieu.
Theosophical
author Barada Kanta
Majumdar drew parallels between tantric-yogic practices, Mesmerism and
Spiritualism. His remarkable identification of ‘western’ and ‘Tantrik Occultism’ is among others explained by Majumdar in
his contribution to Tukaram Tatya’s (1836–1898)
influential Guide to Theosophy from 1887. In ‘The Occult Sciences,’ Majumdar
emphasized that western science was only rediscovering what Indian Tantric
wisdom had already been practicing throughout the ages. While Theosophists and
other esotericists had long claimed the superiority
of their synthesis of science, religion, and philosophy over ‘materialistic’
mainstream science and scholarship, this declaration of Indian
spiritual-scientific superiority was a key characteristic of the discourse
about yoga, meditation, and tantra.
These assertions of
authenticity and superiority played directly into the inner-esoteric identity
struggles revolving around initiation into higher knowledge, and the
‘competent’ practice of magic. For this reason, the western esoteric reception
of Indian concepts was strongly contested, chaotic, and often
self-contradictory. What can be said with certainty is that western esotericism
and Indian traditions became deeply intertwined in the process.
Although a footnote
in the Theosophist from June 1883 was still cautious to distinguish between ‘black’
and ‘white’ tantra analogous to black and white magic, several Theosophists
were now willing to recognize the value of ‘Tantrik
Occultism’ as the highest form of Indian esotericism.
In 1887, Srish Chandra Vasu (1861–1918) published The Esoteric Science
and Philosophy of the Tantras, a translation of the Śiva Saṃhitā.
Vasu (also spelled Basu as is his brother's name) was
a Bengali civil servant and Sanskritist who was
closely involved in Theosophical circles. Notably, he edited Sabhapati Swami’s work and appeared to have introduced the
notion of ‘Mesmerism’ into it. Vasu became a widely-read key actor for ‘Hindu
revivalism’ in the early twentieth century and promoted the values of Indian
culture based around the celebration of yogic texts, most notably the Śiva Saṃhitā and the Gheraṇḍa Saṃhitā, from an early point on. Apart from being hugely
popular among esoteric actors, he was also cited by established academics such
as Friedrich Max Müller in his Six Systems of Indian Philosophy (1899)2.
Early contradictions
In modern
translations and exegeses of “classical” hatha yoga texts, there was often a
marked hostility toward the very practitioners of the doctrines under
consideration. And not only Vasu but also exponents of 'practical' yoga in the
West, Swami Vivekananda and Mme. H. P. Blavatsky (who early on worked
with the Arya Samaj one of the spiritual and intellectual progenitors of the RSS and
its offshoot the BJP), we're actually themselves pointedly antagonistic to
Hatha yoga practices and purposefully avoided association with them in their
respective formulations (even though such elements are not absent from their
teachings).
However, Vasu’s
translations of hatha yoga texts were one of the very few accessible sources
for English speakers wishing to find out more on the topic. The only other
widely available printed English translations of Hatha yoga texts were Ayangar’s Hatha Yoga Pradlpika (Theosophical
Society 1893), Ayangar, and Iyer’s Occult Physiology. Notes on Mata Yoga
(Theosophical Society 1893).
As some of the very
earliest and most widely distributed English translations of hatha yoga texts,
therefore, Vasu’s editions not only defined to a large extent the choice of
texts that would henceforth be included within the Hatha yoga “canon” but were
also instrumental in mediating Hatha yoga’s status both within modern
anglophone yoga as a whole and within the new, “free-thinking” modern Hinduism
identified by Vasu. For many decades, indeed, these works continued to be the
source texts for anyone interested in discovering more about hatha yoga, and
they are still republished and read today.3
What is being
attempted in Vasu’s Sacred Books translation is a redefinition of the yogin, in
which the grassroots practitioner of Hatha methods has no part. The modern
yogin must be scientific, where the Hatha yogin is not.
Vasu’s introduction
thus seems to flatly condemn the very practices of which his translation is a
document. If these practices, and those who undertake them, are morally
suspect, why bother representing them for an English-speaking audience at all?
Why not simply omit them, as Indologist Max Müller had done? What is
surprising is that Vasu’s original 1895 translation of his Gheranda Samhita opens with a dedication by the
“humble sevaka” Vasu to the well-known guru,
“whose practical illustrations and teachings convinced the translator of the
reality, utility, and the immense advantages of Hatha Yoga.” In this earlier
edition, therefore, Vasu presents himself as a “humble servant” (i.e., student
and devotee) of a renowned Hatha yogin, an insider rather than a mere impartial
critical commentator on hatha yoga. There is none of the doom-filled warnings
of the 1915 edition but rather a marked emphasis on the benefits of the
practices, as well as a long account of the miraculous, forty-day “burial” of
his guru under “scientific” supervision.
Vasu’s intention in
the 1915 volume is not simply to decry Hatha yogins but
to fashion an idea of what a real practitioner of yoga should be, an ideal
thoroughly informed by the scientific, rational, and “classical” values of the
day. Yoga implores Vasu, must be looked upon as legitimate science.
S. C. Vasu’s brother
and editor, Major Basu, was in fact one of the
early, leading lights of yoga that would come to full flower in India during
the 1920s and 1930s with Sri Yogendra (born Manibhai
Desai, 1897–1989) and Swami Kuvalayananda(born
Jagannatha Ganesa Gune, 30 August 1883 – 18 April
1966). As a brief review of the early orientations of Vasu and Basu shows, however, the dawn of Hatha yoga as
promoted by Shri Yogendra and Swami Kuvalayananda. Arrived several decades earlier than has
been supposed.
Basu
associated the chakras with the nerve plexuses, a product of both Theosophical
and traditional Indian concepts and an important step in the development of
modern yoga systems. Early Mesmeric theories had already emphasized the
importance of the ganglia for interactions between a subtle and a material body
through ‘fine’ forces; this now became an integral point of reference for the
explanation of the yogic base of the brain; that is below the sixth chakra
instead of at the crown of the head. Basu associated
the chakras with the nerve plexuses, a product of both Theosophical and
traditional Indian concepts and an important step in the development of modern
yoga systems. Early Mesmeric theories had already emphasized the importance of
the ganglia for interactions between a subtle and a material body through
‘fine’ forces; this now became an integral
point of reference for explaining yogic techniques. The association of
the nervous system and the chakras is often traced to Vasant G. Rele’s Mysterious Kundalini from 1927, which appeared
almost forty years after Basu’s article.4
Another important
early moment in the reconciliation of tradition is A Treatise on the Yoga
Philosophy by Dr. N. C. Paul (also known as Navma Candra
Pala), originally published in 1850 but saved obscurity by the Theosophical
Society reprint of 1888. Perhaps even more than Basu’s work,
this study might be credited as the first attempt to marry Hatha yoga practice
and theory with modern medical science. Paul considers Hatha yogic suspension
of the breath and blood circulation in Western medical terms, once again (like
Vasu) evoking the internment of the guru Haridas as
the paradigm of yogic physiological control. As Blavatsky notes, the book’s
appearance in 1850 “produced a sensation amongst the representatives of medicine
in India, and a lively polemic between the Anglo-Indian and native journalists”
5.
Copies were even
burned because the text was "offensive to the science of physiology and
pathology 6. However, its republication by the Theosophical Society, in the
same year as Basu’s seminal article in the
Society’s journal, relaunched it as a key text in the early formulation of
hatha yoga as science, and it was used as an authoritative source on hatha yoga
by some European scholars.
The uniqueness of
India's theosophical movement rested on the fact that theosophy initiated its
own brand of modernity, thus creating a nexus between religion and politics in
a much more pronounced way than the other neo-Hindu organizations did.
Professor Gauri Vishwanathan tells us how
the theosophists cite race theory to get Hindu converts. As shown earlier,
the ‘Aryan myth’ found great
popularity in 19th century Europe. German Idealism started viewing Indian upper
castes as Aryans: though much degenerated than their European counterparts due
to long intermarriages with Indian aborigines. Blavatsky and her followers saw
Aryans as the fifth root-race on
earth and the highest in contemporary times.
As seen above, the
foremost exponents of practicing yoga in the West, Swami Vivekananda and Mme.
H. P. Blavatsky, were actually themselves pointedly antagonistic to Hatha
practices and purposefully avoided association with them in their respective
formulations (even though such elements are not absent from their teachings).
Enter New Thought
Another crucial
role for modern yogic and meditational practices was played by a heterogenous
current called New Thought, which was largely stimulated by the writings of the
US-based Mesmeric healer Phineas Quimby
(1802–1866).
In this milieu,
Vivekananda was especially popular during his activities in the United States
since 1893.
Clearly influenced by
New Thought was Yogi Ramacharaka
(alias William Walker Atkinson (1862–1932), who wrote in a
1904 book subtitled The Yogi Philosophy of Physical Well-Being, which was
written by a Baltimore native using the pen name Ramacharaka.
“If we can but grasp the faintest idea of what this means, we will open
ourselves up to such an influx of Life and vitality that our bodies will be practically
made over and will manifest perfectly.”
In the 1930s, several
South Asian yoga teachers in the United States presented the Yogi Ramacharaka exercises to US audiences as ancient Indian
yogic practices. The US-born Atkinson, who never traveled to India, wound up
influencing Indian understandings of yoga and beyond. Even if Ramacharaka’s teachings have little (if any) historical
continuity with Indian forms of yoga, his ideas and practices have become
central to the framing of many modern yoga traditions in cosmopolitan contexts
and Indian ones.7
Enter present day Yoga
The first half of the
twentieth century was a dynamic period during which what was understood as yoga,
particularly yoga as a health-promoting activity, was rapidly changing. Soon
important figures in this reframing were Bishnu Charan Ghosh ( 1903 – 1970), Tirumalai
Krishnamacharya (1888–1989), who operated a yogaśāla
in Mysore (1933–1950) and Chennai (Madras) from 1952.
The earliest
reference to a sun salutation in yogic texts appears in Brahmananda’s
nineteenth-century commentary on the Hatha Pradipika,
which warns against “activities that cause physical stress like excessive Surya
namaskars or carrying heavy loads.” Another way to translate this is “lifting
weights,” which was also a popular training method by the 1930s. It is often
unclear what came from where, but there are obvious overlaps between gymnastics
and dynamic forms of yoga, such as those taught in Mysore by
Krishnamacharya.8
Although, as seen
above, the physical methods of haṭha were
dismissed by Vivekananda (and the highly influential Theosophical Society)
as inferior to the ‘mental’ rājayoga, by the 1920s
and 1930s, haṭha was beginning to gain prominence in
the hands of innovators like the above mentioned Swami Kuvalayananda,
and Shri Yogendra published extensively in English, including their
respective journals Yoga and Yoga-Mīmāṃsā.
Swami Kuvalayananda founded his Kaivalyadhama
ashram in Lonavla (near Pune) in 1924. Shri
Yogendra's Yoga Institute in Santa Cruz (now a suburb of Mumbai) was a pioneer
in offering curative yoga therapy to middle-class patrons during the twentieth
century.
Yogendra had been a
keen athlete and wrestler in his youth and, shortly after establishing his
Institute, spent four years in the United States. It is possible that he gave
the first-ever demonstrations of asanas. Both Yogendra and Kuvalayananda
focused primarily on yoga as a physical practice. Both were also concerned with
investigating modern scientific justifications for yoga's perceived health
benefits - they are often seen as pioneers of the modern discipline of yoga
therapy.
They also had an
interest in bringing yoga to a wider audience, which they did through several
popular publications aimed at the ‘person in the street.’ In the teachings of
Yogendra and Kuvalayananda, we perhaps first
encounter standing postures such as triangle pose (trikondsana)
or the warrior postures of contemporary yoga.
Autobiography of a Yogi
Bishnu Charan Ghosh was a younger brother of the yogi Paramahansa Yogananda, who became
world-famous through his 1946 book Autobiography of a Yogi. This
whereby the teacher of Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952) was Sri Yukteswar, an honorary member of the Theosophical
Society, whose Kaivalya Darsanam: The Holy
Science (1894) mentions Western astrology and fringe science speculations about
electricity and magnetism using the concepts of occult
sciences and the astral body. Paramahansa Yogananda, one
of the most popular Yoga purveyors in the West, continued
these lines of thought.
Yogananda’s followers helped him buy a property on Mount
Washington that he called the “Spiritual White House.” He hosted the first
Easter sunrise service on the site, even before the property departed from
escrow. It is a tradition that continues in many SRF temples today.
Yogananda during his first Easter Sunrise service at the
Mountain Self-Realization Fellowship Headquarters. Washington:
Paramahansa Yogananda taught a mixture
of both in the United States in the 1920s, calling it Yogoda
and describing it as “muscle recharging through will power.” His “Energization
Exercises” promised well-being. “What is desirable in body culture is the
harmonious development of power over the muscles' voluntary actions and the
involuntary processes of heart, lungs, stomach, etc.,” says one of his
pamphlets. “This is what gives health.”
The influence of Yogananda still feels in popular culture, his face and the
faces of his three gurus are the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
album, and about contemporary thought. Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple,
demanded that everyone attending his memorial service be given a copy of “an
autobiography of a yogi.”
Yogananda when he was speaking at the Los Angeles Philharmonic
Auditorium in 1925:
The wellness culture
The wellness culture
became the main goal for Indian teachers, who marketed cures for modern stress.
“An ideal system of Physical Culture must make special provision for
nerve-building,” explains an article on yoga from the 1920s by Kuvalayananda, who researched physical benefits at his Kaivalyadhama institute near Mumbai. Spiritual goals are
less often mentioned. From Kuvalayananda’s
perspective: “Yogic Therapeutics aims at restoring the internal secretions to
their normality by securing the health of the endocrine organs.”
Despite all the talk
about science, many yogic experiments seem inconclusive, even today. Although
subjects report feeling better, the role of placebo effects is unclear,
including the power of autosuggestion. The Integral Yoga taught by Aurobindo
Ghose in the early twentieth century sounds like New Thought. Advocating “the
service of a greater Reality than the ego,” Aurobindo says: “The whole being
has to be trained so that it can respond and be transformed when that greater
Light and Force can work in nature.”
Western approaches
had similar ideas. According to Per Henrik Ling: “Gymnastic exercises are not
only a means for the development of the body, but also for that of the mental
and spiritual man.” By the 1930s, this was also true for women. With regular
practice of the “Stretch-and-Swing System” of yoga-like postures, said their creator
Mollie Bagot Stack, who had spent time in India, a woman “can bring herself
into harmony with the great mysterious forces around her, and acquire an inner
power which will carry her triumphantly through the rough places of life.”
A few decades later,
the restorative essence of practice was captured by the title of a book by
B.K.S. Iyengar: Yoga: The Path to Holistic Health.9
Postural yoga’s popularisation is explained in part because it more often
provided quick and direct access to the perceived benefits of yoga, rather than
indirect access through the intermediary role of a (far-removed) teacher or
text. Postural yoga gurus’ marketing campaigns increasingly attempted to
convince people to choose their particular renditions of yoga as one part of individual
self-development programs. They worked within a market in which wares were most
successful when they could be easily fit into individualized lifestyles.
Needless to say, many
of these yoga advocates abandoned all or any of the alleged rules, such as
those dealing with alms, celibacy, scriptural study, and retreat from society
or social norms, which traditionally separated the yoga practitioner from
society so that they could sell yoga as a form of fitness, self-care, and
wellness.
Conclusion
In the early years of
the twentieth century, outside of general ideas of being mental and magical,
there was no singular or stable idea of ‘yoga’. These peripatetic instructors
would freely borrow and modify ideas and practices from New Thought,
Spiritualism, and occultism and present it to US audiences as ancient yogic
wisdom from India.
While the
counter-culture of the 1960s marked a distinct period in popularising
a variety of ‘eastern’ religions and spiritualities in the global context, its
influence has often been over-estimated. Occultists explored the ‘hippy trail,’
alternative religions, and mind-altering practices in the early twentieth
century marked a ‘widening of the road’ rather than the paving of new ground.
Likewise, the shifting foci towards consumerism and individualism at the end of
the twentieth century did not mark the end of counter-cultural communities,
camps, and festivals that use yoga and meditation as integral parts of their
identity
In the 1960s, the
Maharishi Maheshi Yogi and his Transcendental
Meditation as scientific was hugely influential in creating scientific interest
in the biological effects of meditation, and later yoga. The 1975 book The
Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson and Miriam Klipper
presented Transcendental Meditation to the public in an accessible and
scientifically supported form and was cited in a 1986 survey reported in the
New York Times as the most-recommended book by clinical psychologists to their
patients.10
The prescriptions for
self-care or personal liberation as is common today have little or nothing to
do with societal transformation; instead, to speak of yoga as if it represents
a static essence that can be seamlessly transmitted from one
consumer-practitioner to another, the transmission is far messier. Usually, it
does not take place between social equals.
Consumers appropriate
cultural products because there is something evocative about them. Thus Middle-
or upper-class white yoga consumers living in the globalized twenty-first
century, for example, often imagine themselves as materially rich but
spiritually poor and, in turn, see South Asians as materially poor but offering
great spiritual wealth or wisdom. In these representations, it becomes clear
how capitalism, colonialism, racism, nationalism, and orientalism engender and
reify one another by discouraging reflection.
It follows an
ideology that you need to work on yourself, rather than look to social
resources to solve your problems or demand structural changes. Through an ethic
of self-care, the yoga industry trains consumers not only to believe that their
bodily and social conditions are under their control but to feel ashamed about
those parts of their lives that do not comply with cultural ideals. The yoga
industry fabricates this neoliberal-individual understanding of self-care and
the ideal of the free entrepreneurial individual. Teachers and entrepreneurs
use yoga to advocate for the promise that free markets and for-profits will
bring healing and empowerment to those who make the right consumer
choices.
In their view, these
commodities function like a fetish that helps consumers feel as if they have
escaped reality. In other words, they offer consumers an escape into an
experience (of the present moment, of a romanticized or orientalized
Other, or an idealized ancient past), which allows them to imagine themselves
as separate from the busyness of everyday life, and by extension disconnected
from the social and economic relations of global capitalism.
This form of yoga
ultimately directs its address to the middle- and upper-middle classes,
effectively erasing the vast majority of the population's problems from its
view. And, since teachers’ and entrepreneurs’ aim is often bottom-line profit,
they are usually uninterested in social justice, or mass mobilization or at
least those are not prioritized. Furthermore, as much as individual consumers
are not in control of their physical living conditions or places on the socio-economic
hierarchy, shopping for yoga and its accouterments gives consumers a sense of
control over their lives. A wide range of commodities, mats, apparel, books,
classes, workshops, are celebrated as good consumer choices, products that lead
to better living outcomes. Adherents of this type of yoga use the notion of
consumer choice to convince themselves they are in control of their wellbeing,
self-care, and happiness.
For more on the
subject of Yoga see our article Yoga: Yoga.
1. Borayin Larios and Mark Singleton, Routledge
Handbook of Yoga and Meditation Studies 2020, p. 37
2. Mark Singleton,
Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice, 2010, pp.44–53.
3. On this, see
James Mallinson, The Gheranda Samhita. New
York: YogaVidya.com, 2004, and James Mallinson and Mark Singleton, Roots
of Yoga, 2017, 140–41.
4. Julian Strube in Routledge Handbook of Yoga and Meditation
Studies, 2020, p. 130.
5. Personal Memoirs
Of HP Blavatsky - Mary K Neff, 1937: 94-95.
6. Idem, 95
7. Suzanne Newcombe
and Philip Deslippe in Routledge Handbook of Yoga and
Meditation Studies,2020 p. 353.
8. Daniel Simpson,
The Truth of Yoga: A Comprehensive Guide to Yoga's History, Texts, Philosophy,
and Practices, 2021, p. 172.
9. Simpson, The Truth
of Yoga, p. 174.
10. W.
S. Hickey, Mind Cure: How Meditation Became Medicine. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
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