The Subtle Body

I spent August reading Stephanie Syman's The Subtle Body: The History of Yoga in America, and here's what I found most fascinating - I didn't learn any of this in my yoga teacher training.

If I were to base what I know about yoga's presence in North America solely on the history presented in my Yoga Work's training, I would believe that Hatha yoga was non-existent before Indra Devi began teaching in the late 40's or early 50's.

In fact, yoga arrived in the United States via The Atlantic, a quasi-political literary magazine courtesy of Emerson, Thoreau and company prior to the American Civil War and by the late 1800's there were not only yoga communes but studios, where the meditation and yoga were taught by American teachers - mostly young women who were former dancers.

Many of yoga's main players in the U.S. were a mix of Indian gurus and their well-to-do American students. The Indians, who came to America to enlighten and set the record straight about their country, people and belief systems, fell into careers as lecturers and teachers who spawned true believers and yoga practices in their wake.

The book starts slow. Aside from the fact that Thoreau apparently tried to teach himself to mediate using the few books on the subject that he could find, the first couple of chapters nearly had me ready to give up and take the book back to the library.

But perseverance is it's own reward and I was richly repaid as the book moved forward.

One of the most interesting yogi's of the early Hatha movement was a man named Theos Bernard. The nephew of one of the first yoga studio founders in New York City, Theos contracted rheumatic fever as a teenager which greatly damaged his heart muscle. He turned to yoga, believing that it could restore his health. After ten years of study - some of which took him to India where he spent years studying asana and theory - his doctors were startled to discover that yoga had healed the young man's damaged heart.

If you are in the mood for a history book, I highly recommend Syman's history. She tells a good tale as she enlightens.