People have been debating yoga’s purpose, its scope, and how to practice it for centuries. So not surprisingly, the history of yoga in America is also convoluted and complicated. Stefanie Syman, in “The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), makes a great effort to explain yoga’s place in […]
Survey of Yoga Students Correlates Home Practice with Health and Happiness
In his legendary “The Physiology of Taste“, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin writes “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” A recent survey of Iyengar yoga students* has a similar idea: Tell me about your home practice, and I will tell you about your general health, mindfulness, and more. A clever […]
“If You Want to Be a Yogi and Have Heavenly Dreams…”, the New York Herald on Yoga, 1898
As promised, here is the full text of the 1898 article from the New York Herald on the pursuit of “perfect happiness” through yoga by “New York’s Fashionables.” The many subheadlines for the article is one of the charming things about the article, as they lead the reader into the story and pique your interest […]
“Yoga is the latest diversion of New York society,” Claims Major Newspaper
Your initial thought might be that I pulled the subject line from a recent newspaper, but would you believe that the line appeared in 1898? It’s true, there was a mini-boomlet of yoga in New York near the end of the 19th century, and the New York Herald devoted nearly a whole page to the […]
Musical Shell Game: Yoga Poses and Musical Instruments
And now for something completely different: yoga poses and musical instruments. During a weekend intensive at Adeline Yoga in Berkeley last May, our teacher Heather Haxo-Phillips was taking us through some arm asanas and ended up at gomukhasana, also known as the cow-face pose (photos and background at Yoga Journal and Wikipedia). Heather mentioned that […]