Yoga in the United States

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A community outdoor yoga class in Dallas–Fort Worth, Texas, 2010

The history of

Ida C. Craddock and the businessman and occultist Pierre Bernard, created their own interpretations of yoga, based on tantra
and oriented to physical pleasure.

The practice of yoga as consisting mainly of physical postures began in 1919 when the pioneer of asana-based yoga,

Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga and its Power Yoga spinoffs. Spiritual styles also flourished, including Transcendental Meditation and Integral Yoga. Despite this, American yoga has largely detached from its religious roots, becoming part of the cosmopolitan "global popular".[1]

Early pioneers

Ralph Waldo Emerson was influenced by the Bhagavad Gita.

Long before yoga arrived in the United States, pioneering thinkers began to assimilate Indian thought.

Advaita. He had studied among other Hindu scriptures the Bhagavad Gita, in which Krishna instructs Arjuna in yoga. Emerson was mercilessly[4] mocked, and 26 parodies of the poem were published within a month of its appearance; Americans were starting to engage with Hindu philosophy.[5]

Stefanie Syman argues that he deserved the title of Yogi.[6]

Another pioneer was

Ceylon and astonishing the American public by suddenly converting to Buddhism, a tradition that Syman notes was even more deeply despised in the 19th century United States than Hinduism.[7][8]

Arrival

Swami Vivekananda brought yoga to the United States in 1893, but rejected the practice of asanas.

In 1893,

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.[12]

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.[13]

Pierre Bernard in lotus position, 1939. He brought attention to yoga but caused the public to associate it with trickery and magic.[14]

Another controversial figure,

mummery, and black magic".[19] 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.[18]

Yoga as asanas

Between the wars

Yogendra, here in Siddhasana, brought the practice of asanas to the United States in 1919.

Yoga asanas were brought to the United States in 1919 by Yogendra, sometimes called "the Father of the Modern Yoga Renaissance",[20] his system influenced by the physical culture of Max Müller; his Yoga Institute of America in Harriman, New York, operated for a few years.[20] The following year, the Hindu spiritual leader Paramahansa Yogananda spoke about Kriya Yoga in Boston, and in 1925 he founded the Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles, where he taught yoga, including asanas, breathing, chanting and meditation, to tens of thousands of Americans, as described in his classic 1946 book Autobiography of a Yogi.[9][21][22][23]

Supta Virasana, wearing a silver-coloured bikini with matching turban. Studio photograph by John de Mirjian
, c. 1928

Yoga and meditation appear in

The Nudist in 1938 showing nude women practising yoga, accompanied by a text on attention to the breath. The social historian Sarah Schrank comments that it made perfect sense to combine nudism and yoga, as "both were exercises in healthful living; both were countercultural and bohemian; both highlighted the body; and both were sensual without being explicitly erotic."[26]

Theos Bernard's 1943 Hatha Yoga: The Report of a Personal Experience 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. He was Pierre Bernard's nephew, and contrary to his implication that he had learnt hatha yoga from a guru in India, his teacher was in all probability his father.[9][27]

After the Second World War

In 1948,

Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centres worldwide, with its headquarters in Montreal, Canada. His The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga (1960) 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.[9][29][30]

Indra Devi's 1959 Yoga for Americans encouraged women to practise at home. On the cover (top left), she wears her characteristic sari.

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.[33][34]

In 1966, another of Krishnamacharya's pupils, his brother-in-law

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.[9][37][38]

Yet another of Krishnamacharya's pupils,

Yoga as spiritual practice

Woodstock Festival
in 1969

From 1918, Pierre Bernard and his wife Blanche DeVries ran

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.[14][49][50][51]

American yoga again took a turn towards the spiritual in the 1960s.

Woodstock festival.[9][53] A Harvard professor, Richard Alpert, travelled to India as a pilgrim. He came back to the United States as a guru named Ram Dass, and in 1970 toured its university campuses, encouraging a lifestyle of spiritual search, supported by his book Be Here Now.[9][54]

In 1975, the yoga teacher

Protestant streak, as it is both "an indulgence and a penance."[60][61]

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 such as yoga pants, and equipment including yoga mats worth $16 billion, compared to $10 billion in 2012. Some 72 percent of practitioners were women.[62]

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.[63] Farmer identifies 12 general trends in yoga's history in the United States from the 1890s to the 21st century:

peripheral to central; local to global; male to (predominantly) female; spiritual to (mostly)

esoteric to accessible; oral to hands-on teaching; textual to photographic representations of poses; contorted social pariahs to lithe social winners.[64]

Considering all these trends, Farmer stated that modern yoga as exercise belonged to Srinivas Aravamudan's category of the "global popular",[64] which Farmer glossed as "a postcolonial realm of religious cosmopolitanism."[64]

Few yoga practitioners are from minority ethnic groups.[65]

In Lasater's view, American yoga in the 21st century has lost "the gentleness, consistency, and direction of the practice",[66] replaced by ambition. Lasater believes that many Americans "have conflated asana with yoga."[66] Schrank, reviewing the literature in 2014, noted that the journalist William Broad's The Science of Yoga, "lambasted mercilessly by the American yoga community",[67] however took yoga seriously as therapy for mind, body, and spirit.[67] Schrank describes the situation of yoga in the United States as "a complicated dynamic between transnational history, cultural appropriation, and therapeutic science". Schrank notes that none of the books she reviewed addressed the feminist, class, or racial aspects of American yoga, even though most practitioners are women and few are from minority ethnic groups.[65]

See also

References

  1. ^ Farmer 2012.
  2. ^ Goldberg 2013, pp. 26–46.
  3. ^ Syman 2010, pp. 11–14, 20–25.
  4. ^ Syman 2010, p. 13.
  5. ^ Syman 2010, pp. 11–14.
  6. ^ Syman 2010, pp. 26–36.
  7. ^ a b Syman 2010, pp. 62–63.
  8. ^ a b Goldberg 2013, pp. 47–66.
  9. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Hammond 2018.
  10. ^ Syman 2010, pp. 37–61.
  11. ^ Goldberg 2013, pp. 67–86.
  12. ^ Singleton 2018.
  13. ^ Jain 2015, pp. 22–25.
  14. ^ a b Syman 2010, pp. 80–115.
  15. ^ Syman 2010, pp. 80–83.
  16. ^ Syman 2010, p. 84.
  17. ^ Syman 2010, pp. 85–86.
  18. ^ a b Jain 2015, pp. 25–26.
  19. ^ Syman 2010, p. 87.
  20. ^ a b Mishra 2016.
  21. ^ Ricci 2007.
  22. ^ Singleton 2010, pp. 131–132.
  23. ^ Yogananda 1971.
  24. ^ Agniel 1931.
  25. ^ Routledge 2014.
  26. ^ Schrank 2016, pp. 159–160.
  27. ^ Veenhof 2011.
  28. ^ Devi 1953.
  29. ^ Vishnudevananda 1988.
  30. ^ Syman 2010, pp. 179–197.
  31. ^ a b Syman 2010, pp. 246–247.
  32. ^ Hyams 1961.
  33. ^ Syman 2010, pp. 247–248.
  34. ^ Schneider 2003, pp. 10–15.
  35. ^ Iyengar 1991.
  36. ^ Schneider 2003, pp. 50–54.
  37. ^ Kripalu 2019.
  38. ^ Pizer 2019.
  39. ^ a b Syman 2010, pp. 272–277.
  40. ^ Ashtanga 2011.
  41. ^ YJ Ashtanga 2019.
  42. ^ Pizer b 2019.
  43. ^ Singleton 2010, p. 176.
  44. ^ YJ Power 2019.
  45. ^ Birch 1995.
  46. ^ Jois 1995.
  47. ^ Syman 2010, pp. 268–272.
  48. ^ Syman 2010, pp. 276–278.
  49. ^ Gershon 2018.
  50. ^ Laycock 2013.
  51. ^ Love 2010.
  52. ^ Goldberg 2013, pp. 151–175.
  53. ^ Goldberg 2013, pp. 197–209.
  54. ^ Goldberg 2013, pp. 219–235.
  55. ^ Syman 2010, pp. 244–245, 248–249.
  56. ^ Schneider 2003, p. 88.
  57. ^ Syman 2010, pp. 264–267, 281–283.
  58. ^ a b Miller 2009.
  59. ^ Albanese 2007, p. 347.
  60. ^ Syman 2010, p. 291.
  61. ^ Farmer 2012, p. 156.
  62. ^ Ipsos 2016.
  63. ^ Farmer 2012, p. 145.
  64. ^ a b c Farmer 2012, p. 157.
  65. ^ a b Schrank 2014, pp. 169–182.
  66. ^ a b Schneider 2003, p. 89.
  67. ^ a b Schrank 2014, p. 173.

Sources