Yoga in Britain

Add links
This is a good article. Click here for more information.
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

For the 2019 book by Suzanne Newcombe, see Yoga in Britain: Stretching Spirituality and Educating Yogis.
Medway Poets
.

Yoga in Britain is the practice of

Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga
.

Before the 20th century, yoga was known only from the reports of travellers to India, which described deceptive vagabonds pretending to be pious. Among the first to publicise yoga in Britain in the early 1900s was the

Sir Paul Dukes presented the BBC
's first yoga television programmes to a small audience.

Classes called yoga began in the 1960s, becoming popular especially

Yoga for Health
.

School of Oriental and African Studies
.

History

Ascetics under a banyan tree, from Collections of Travels Through Turky into Persia and the East-Indies by Jean-Baptiste Tavernier
, 1688

Early travellers

The yoga scholar

ascetics who held postures until their limbs withered; he called such people "Vagabonds" who pretended to be pious.[4]

Before the Second World War

Mary Bagot Stack in "Seal" posture (now Salabhasana, locust pose) in Building the Body Beautiful, the Bagot Stack Stretch-and-Swing System, 1931

Early in the 1900s, the occultist

Yoga Sutras. He claimed to have attained the spiritual state of dhyana, the seventh stage on the path to enlightenment defined by Patanjali.[6]
In 1939, Crowley gave a series of lectures on yoga, under the "modest"[7] pseudonym of Mahatma Guru Sri Paramahansa Shivaji.[b] He helped to link yoga in the mind of the British public with magic, yogis with fakirs, and tantra with "Western esoteric sexual practices".[8]

In the 1930s, the yoga scholar

Eka Pada Viparita Dandasana.[10] Similar postures were taught to the Women's League of Health and Beauty in Britain by Mary Bagot Stack in the period between the world wars with the "Bagot Stack Stretch-and-Swing System". Stack had travelled to India, and had learnt some yoga poses there.[11]

1945–1980

Further information: Yoga for women
Yogini Sunita's charisma attracted a large female following in Birmingham in the 1960s.[12]

The

still shows three women in Shirshasana (tripod headstand) on a circular stage.[14]

Classes in yoga as exercise started to appear across Britain in the 1960s, and asana sessions became a common option among

local education authority, and founded in turn the Birmingham Yoga Club, the Midlands Yoga Association, and finally the British Wheel of Yoga in 1965. Yoga groups soon sprang up all over Britain.[15]

The yoga researcher

Franciscan nun but left the convent and then learnt "Pranayama Yoga" in Bombay, marrying another Indian Catholic, Roydon Cabral. In 1960 she moved to Birmingham, taught yoga to a few friends, and by 1961 presented herself in a sari as "Yogini Sunita", exciting curiosity by sitting on the floor. An interviewer described her at that time as "wearing a flame-coloured sari, sandals and long silver earrings with her dark hair swept back in a chignon."[12] She was a charismatic teacher, attracting many middle-class women with her calm, relaxed manner, her skill and air of authority when teaching relaxation, and her ability to combine bringing up a family with a busy schedule of teaching and writing.[12][16]

The modern yoga guru
B. K. S. Iyengar with yoga teacher Malcolm Strutt at Iyengar Centre House, London, 1971

Yoga reached London's evening classes in 1967. The

Visistadvaita, a qualified non-dualism within Hinduism.[17] The ILEA had considered the British Wheel of Yoga, but, Newcombe suggests, since the Wheel had argued that yoga was not a physical education topic, McIntosh doubted they would be able to provide good quality yoga as ILEA physical education.[18]

In 1968, the rock music group

Sikh woman from Punjab, taught yoga, pranayama and relaxation in the wave of interest generated by The Beatles; her students Frank and Hazel Wills ran a yoga slot on the BBC lunchtime programme Pebble Mill at One starting in 1973.[16]

Yoga classes grew beyond those of local education authorities when

ballerina Lyn Marshall was chosen to demonstrate the poses under his instruction, on the grounds that "any reasonably fit person"[21] could benefit from yoga, even though, as Newcombe remarks, Marshall was, as a trained dancer, hardly average.[21] Marshall went on to publish a series of illustrated guides to yoga, including Wake Up to Yoga (1975) and Keep Up with Yoga (1976).[22] Newcombe estimates that the number of people, mainly middle-class women,[d] practising yoga in Britain rose from about 5,000 in 1967 to 50,000 in 1973 and 100,000 by 1979; most of their teachers were also women. With the rise of feminism and higher education for women, middle-class British women were starting to resent being housewives, and given their relative economic freedom, were ready to experiment with new lifestyles such as yoga. Newcombe speculates that their husbands may have found having their wives attending "course on traditionally feminine subjects like flower arranging or cooking ... less threatening and more respectable than employment outside the home."[24] The women saw evening classes as safe, interesting, and a good place to make friends with like-minded people. Further, women in Britain were accustomed to gendered physical education, dating back to Mary Bagot Stack before the Second World War.[25]

1980s onwards

Further information: Yoga as exercise
Yoga camp, Oxford, 2016

Adult education funding was cut sharply in the 1980s when

Surya Namaskar, the salute to the sun.[26]

The first Iyengar Yoga Institute (IYI) outside India was founded in Maida Vale, London, in 1983.[27] The old IYI building was replaced in 1994, and the new one was officially opened by Iyengar in person in 1997. From the start, Iyengar personally assessed the quality of the teaching every year.[28]

Alongside the yoga brands, many teachers, for example in England, offer an unbranded "hatha yoga", often

vinyasas), and new variants of poses are often created.[29][30][31] The gender imbalance has sometimes been marked; in Britain in the 1970s, women formed between 70 and 90 per cent of most yoga classes, as well as most of the yoga teachers.[24] This caused yoga to evolve as a female practice, taught by women to women.[32]

By 2019, yoga had become "massively popular" in Britain,[16] to the extent that its practice was altogether "unremarkable";[1] some 500,000 people practise it regularly each week, and as many as 3 million have at least tried it.[33][34]

Forms and purposes

Further information: Yoga teacher training

In 1993, the

Sports Council gave the British Wheel of Yoga the status of "National Governing Body" for yoga as a "sports activity", effectively taking control away from local authorities. The Wheel ran yoga teacher training programmes and accredited the programmes of other organisations.[35]

By the 21st century, yoga teaching in Britain had changed from mainly publicly funded (by local education authorities) to mainly private, whether in small local groups, advertised classes in venues such as church halls (often British Wheel of Yoga), organised groups like Iyengar Yoga, Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga and Bikram Yoga, or commercial studios providing many different styles of yoga.[26][34][36]

A 2019 project bringing yoga into schools has had "a profound impact" on

autism.[37] The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence has recommended that employers should arrange lunchtime yoga classes to help reduce obesity.[38]

Yoga in Britain is practised in varied settings and

Parkinson's; to awaken Kundalini, and as Christian "PraiseMoves".[39] A hotel in the Lake District offers yoga with ring-tailed lemurs.[40]

Research

School of Oriental and African Studies in London including Mark Singleton and Jason Birch
introduce the 2015–2020 Hatha Yoga Project

Britain has pioneered the academic study of yoga: the

scholar practitioners such as Singleton and James Mallinson who do yoga themselves,[42] and Suzanne Newcombe, who has specifically investigated yoga in Britain in its period of rapid growth and acceptance from 1960 to 1980, as documented in her book Yoga in Britain: Stretching Spirituality and Educating Yogis.[43]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ David Gordon White writes of "a variety of mendicant orders—variously called Yogis, Gosains, Fakirs, or Sanyasis by the British, who had difficulty distinguishing between them".[3]
  2. ^ Crowley's pseudonym means "Great Spirit Teacher Respected Supreme Swan Respected [God] Shiva".
  3. ^ At that time, only a small percentage of households in Britain had a television; but the programmes attracted only a minority of the available audience.[13]
  4. ^ In British usage, the middle class is relatively comfortable, above the working class, well-educated with good jobs.[23]

References

Footnotes

  1. ^ a b Newcombe 2019, p. x.
  2. ^ Ovington, John (1696). A Voyage to Suratt, In the Year, 1689. London: Jacob Tomson.
  3. ^ White & Magee 2019, p. 69.
  4. ^ a b Singleton 2010, pp. 38–39.
  5. ^ Fryer, John (1698). A New Account of East-India and Persia. London: Richard Chiswell.
  6. ^ Booth 2000, pp. 144–147; Churton 2011, pp. 78–83; Kaczynski 2010, pp. 96–98; Singleton 2010, pp. 64–66; Sutin 2000, pp. 94–98.
  7. ^ Singleton 2010, pp. 64–66.
  8. ^ Newcombe 2019, pp. 24–27; Singleton 2010, pp. 64–66.
  9. ^ Singleton 2010, pp. 157–159.
  10. ^ a b c Singleton 2010, pp. 158–159.
  11. ^ Singleton 2010, pp. 160–162.
  12. ^ a b c Newcombe 2014, pp. 148–153.
  13. ^ Newcombe 2019, pp. 179–184.
  14. ^ Newcombe 2019, pp. 177–202.
  15. ^ Newcombe 2007; Newcombe 2019, pp. 40–74.
  16. ^ a b c Newcombe, Suzanne (20 June 2019). "How Yoga Conquered Britain: The Feminist Legacy of Yogini Sunita and Kailash Puri". The Conversation. Retrieved 6 October 2019.
  17. ^ Newcombe 2007; Newcombe 2019, pp. 99, 236–239.
  18. ^ Newcombe 2019, p. 96.
  19. The Tribune
    . 2 March 2015. Retrieved 3 April 2018.
  20. ^ Newcombe 2019, pp. 134–176.
  21. ^ a b Newcombe 2019, pp. 188–194.
  22. ^ "ti:yoga au:Lyn Marshall". WorldCat. Retrieved 6 October 2019.
  23. ^ "Middle Class". Cambridge Dictionary. Cambridge University Press. Retrieved 25 April 2019.
  24. ^ a b Newcombe 2007.
  25. ^ Newcombe 2007; Newcombe 2019, pp. 109–133.
  26. ^ a b c d Newcombe 2019, pp. 258–270.
  27. ^ Goldberg 2016, p. 384.
  28. ^ Redfern, Helen (6 December 2017). "Stepping Inside the Iyengar Yoga Institute in Maida Vale". Yoga Matters. Retrieved 5 April 2019. From 1968, senior UK students of Iyengar yoga had been delivering evening classes through the Inner London Education Authority, assessed annually by Mr Iyengar himself during visits to the UK. With no permanent space to work in, classes were held in school gyms and draughty, noisy rooms with dirty floors. The original building for the Institute was formerly an artist's studio and its members did a lot of the conversion work themselves. The building became a home away from home for B.K.S. Iyengar on visits to Britain. In 1994, the old studio was replaced by the new premises, which were officially inaugurated by Mr Iyengar in 1997.
  29. ^ Singleton 2010, p. 152.
  30. ^ Cook, Jennifer (28 August 2007). "Find Your Match Among the Many Types of Yoga". Yoga Journal.
  31. ^ Beirne, Geraldine (10 January 2014). "Yoga: A Beginner's Guide to the Different Styles". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 1 February 2019.
  32. ^ Hodges 2007, p. 70.
  33. ^ Newcombe 2019, p. 1.
  34. ^ a b Newcombe, Suzanne (5 August 2019). "Yoga in Britain". Religion Media Centre.
  35. ^ Newcombe 2019, pp. 260–261.
  36. ^ "Bikram Yoga: The Story of How Yoga Got Hot". I Yoga London. 23 June 2016.
  37. ^ "Yoga in Schools Has 'Profound Impact' on Behaviour". BBC News. 8 March 2019.
  38. ^ Lyons, Izzy (6 June 2019). "Spinning and Yoga Classes Should Be Introduced by Employers During Lunchtime, NICE Says". The Daily Telegraph. London.
  39. ^ Gowing 2019, especially pp. ix–x.
  40. ^ "Lake District Hotel Launches Lemur Yoga Classes". BBC. 2 April 2019. Retrieved 2 April 2019.
  41. SOAS
    . Retrieved 22 May 2019.
  42. ^ Newcombe 2009.
  43. ^ Newcombe, Suzanne. "Dr Suzanne Newcombe". Open University. Retrieved 17 March 2019.

Bibliography

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Yoga_in_Britain&oldid=1190749536"