Americanized Yoga

Continued from page 2

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

Say "yoga" to most Americans, and they think "yoga poses." With its emphasis on using the physical body as a vehicle for spiritual awakening, hatha yoga--formerly a small and obscure corner of the vast yoga firmament--is the branch of yoga that has flourished here most successfully. Never before in the history of yoga has the practice of physical postures assumed the importance that it has in the West.

Not that other branches of yoga aren't flourishing as well. Bhakti yogis (followers of the path of devotion) are flocking to teachers such as Ammachi, the South Indian "hugging saint" believed by devotees to be an incarnation of the Divine Mother, who draws tens of thousands during her annual Western tour. The charismatic Gurumayi Chidvilasananda--the spiritual head of Siddha Yoga meditation, which teaches a shakti-based path of awakening energy--has tens of thousands of disciples, many of them Manhattan and Los Angeles glitterati.

But these numbers are dwarfed by the millions of Americans for whom yoga means asana--and for whom the physical postures are both the gateway into the practice and the vehicle for the spiritual teachings.

For most of yoga history, the attempt to achieve spiritual awakening--the "union" with the Divine and the "yoking" of the mind that is the literal meaning of the word "yoga"--did not involve any particular physical posture other than the cross-legged meditation pose. The elaborate physical postures and breathing techniques of hatha yoga probably weren't invented until at least the end of the first millennium A.D., as part of the Tantric movement, which celebrated the physical body as a vehicle for enlightenment.

Even then, hatha yoga remained a relatively obscure, esoteric, and even controversial practice. It drew harsh criticism from conservatives who viewed it as subverting the lofty goals of classical yoga. For the most part, it remained the province of sadhus, who practiced it in isolation in their temple monasteries and mountain caves.

Continued on page 4: »