Very much liked the book "The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America", here is why
Posted by the Editor on Aug 7, 2010 in Ashtanga | 0 comments
Although very much steering me away from the 99% practice and 1% theory premisse I found myself wondering about each of the yoga teachers/indian gurus depicted, their lives, how human they all were and how yoga, slowly at times and fast at others, caught on with a passion within our fiery imagination. Perhaps I allowed myself to wonder into gossip territory, feeling the sensations of being in the shoes of an Indra Devi, or one of the Beattles while at yoga teacher training in an Indian ashram.
Highlights for me were the outset going back to Henry David Thoreau. I can see the fundamentals of a yogi life in him after reading Walden
… The more I returned to the sources of Thoreau’s yoga, the more convinced I became that Thoreau was in fact practicing yoga as he understood it…
The tour through the major figures of yoga in America is a delight to read. A recount of Vivekandanda (refusing to teach asana and exalting the religious side of yoga), in contrast to Indra Devi (who trained with Krishnamacharya just like Iyengar and Patthabi Jois) and who:
“…Taught a form of yoga that was intensely physical and made purifying your body the necessary first stage of spiritual training”
I laugh at myself when I realize that the questions I think are so originally mine are not new at all. For over a century there has been a lot of debate around them. What is the best way for yoga to reach us as westerners, what can help us? is there a way for us towards liberation? or do we just compromise at getting our workout done. Then again, is a century or so really that long when it comes to us coming to terms with a so-claimed 5000 years old philosophy?
“), as does the daughter of former president Woodrow, Margaret, whom I have come to associate in my mind with the Eat, Pray and Love
of last century.
And then there is David and Shanon (of the rock’n'roll school of yoga: Jivamukti), quite charming the paralel between the Shakti energetic female strength of Bernard’s (somewhat secret) wife Blanche and Shanon.
Wealth does not get its own chapter but maybe it should cause it plays an enormous part, and speaking of parts, Sunset Boulevard comes in front of, but yet in as big letters as the”Psychedelic Sages” (Ram Das and all that Harvard acid jazz). Guruji and Iyengar do not get their own chapters but I feel a deep respect and admiration for them in the author’s tone.
A surprise was her account of Bikram who is one of those teachers I have a hard time making sense of. But in the context in which he appears here it makes so much sense. He is an important piece in us receiving yoga into our hearts even if through perspiration, I almost feel greatful. You and I enter in the last chapter, “The New Penitents”, oh yeah!.
The one thing that left me thinking and re-thinking was a particular sentence right at the beginning (location 1707-17 in the kindle) of the book:
“Lineage, far more than scriptures or even locale, is the biggest determinate of what yoga is.”
I feel yoga come alive when I read this, I feel how the story is still being written, how we are a part of it, how weather we become enlightened or not is not even in question but that we try, that we explore, that we make it our own and then surrender to what it really is, or at least in the meantime, what we make it to be.
The website “Slate” has an article today by Claire Dederer called Why Americans Love Yoga, with an in-depth review of the book.
