Americanized Yoga

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• Introduction
• Yoginis in Bikinis?
• Asana Rules!
• East Meets West
• Everyday Yogis

Yoginis in Bikinis?
At the 1993 Parliament of World Religions in Chicago, an Indian swami stopped by the Yoga Journal booth to leaf through our calendar. He winced and walked away, sniffing, "Yoga in bikinis!" In Bombay, a few years later, I interviewed Dr. Jayadeva Yogendra, director of the nearby Yoga Institute of Santacruz. His father, at the turn of the 20th century, was one of the first yogic crusaders to bring hatha yoga out of the ashrams and mountain caves and begin teaching it to a lay audience. "When I see what yoga has become in the West," Dr. Yogendra told me mournfully, "I wish my father had left it with the hermits in the caves."

Certainly the form in which yoga is practiced has altered so radically in the West that it is almost unrecognizable to a traditional Hindu, Buddhist, or Jain practitioner. Traveling in India, I met yogis living in caves in the Himalayas, their foreheads painted with insignias marking them as devotees of one of the dozens of yogic sects. I saw them practicing meditation by the banks of the Ganges in Varanasi, their almost-naked bodies covered with ashes from funeral pyres to remind themselves of the impermanence of the flesh.

I visited ashrams decked with brilliantly painted deities and presided over by robed swamis with names as long as their beards. I saw devotees fainting in ecstatic trance at the feet of a woman believed to be an incarnation of the Divine Mother. Not once (outside of a handful of hatha-yoga centers catering almost entirely to Western students) did I see the image that has become almost synonymous with yoga in the Western imagination: a sleek young woman flexing in a Lycra unitard.

But yoga's new body does not necessarily imply a new soul. After all, yoga has been reincarnated a hundred times already.

"Yoga has a history of at least 5,000 years, and in the course of that long history, it has made many adaptations to changing social and cultural traditions," says yoga scholar Georg Feuerstein, author of "The Yoga Tradition." "That's why we have such a rich heritage." Over the centuries, the word "yoga" has been used to describe a wide range of diverse--and sometimes contradictory--practices and philosophies, from ascetic self-mutilations to Tantric rituals, from austere silent meditations to ecstasies of devotional song, from selfless service to total withdrawal from the world.

But yoga is changing more rapidly--and more radically--than ever before. It is confronting a significantly different social system, a different value system. How can we characterize this new and bubbling yogic stew? Three main characteristics distinguish American yoga from its traditional history in India: the prominence of asana (posture) practice; the emphasis on lay practice; and the incorporation of other Eastern contemplative traditions, Western psychology, and mind-body disciplines.

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