Anyone can find tranquility on top of a mountain. Can you find it in the middle of Times Square?
Each summer solstice—the longest and sometimes hottest day of the year—thousands of yoga aficionados, and some novices, gather at Times Square to perform varying sequences of āsanas, or postures. The word solstice itself derives from the Latin sol (sun) and sistere (to stand still) and is of a piece with the event’s stoical organizing theme: “Mind Over Madness.” If you can find peace here—in this cauldron of light and noise, the thinking goes—you can find it anywhere. And so amid the blaring horns of congested traffic, against the backdrop of garish billboards that stretch from 42nd to 48th Streets, and among the unlicensed cartoon mascots—Elmo, Minny, Hello Kitty—gawking tourists and performers like the “naked” cowboy (his guitar positioned just so), the attendees set about twisting and sweating under the midsummer sun.
“If you find your heart needing to expand into 42nd street, contract the shoulder blades,” advised a celebrity yoga instructor, her amplified words spreading through this accidental “square,” this arranged marriage of consumer excess and cultural purism. There is beauty in such images—the body as extensive as a longing love, the mind as even as a length of breath—just as there is also wishful thinking. “We’ve turned Times Square into a temple […] Yoga is magic!” gushed another instructor who had her students doing the “cosmic wave.” The event encapsulates what is best and worst about yoga today: its demotic, everywoman appeal and its fluffy, saccharine spirituality. But as the shadows fell and the trash collected one thing became clear: The “collective ohm” the organizers envisioned did not so much challenge the atmosphere of Times Square as add to it. The major sponsor of the event, after all, was Athleta—the women’s activewear division of The Gap. This was yoga finding its rightful place within the illumined spectrality of branded goods and trademarked fashions. Never had yoga been so big and never had it been so empty.
It was not always thus. Before yoga’s dramatic rise to prominence, it was largely regarded as transgressive, even dangerous. Carl Jung was entranced by it but felt that Westerners were culturally unfit for its practice. As he warned his readers: “Study Yoga; you will learn an infinite amount from it. But do not try to apply it, for we Europeans are not so constituted that we apply these methods correctly, just like that” (Jung 1978, 82). It was dark and difficult, esoteric and exotic—which was part of its appeal of course, especially to the sixties counterculture. One wonders, then, how yoga became so agreeable that people spring to it not only in cozy Brooklyn studios but also in that capital of uncool, the “new” Times Square.
The following analogy is, I think, instructive. Using razor and glue, Thomas Jefferson went through the New Testament and excised all the miracles. What was left was a book of ethics, which he called The Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, a nice, if strange, summation of the country’s founding spirit. A similar thing happened to yoga at the turn of the twentieth century. Once a venerable technique of spiritual liberation, yoga had fallen into disrepute. It had become associated with tantric cults and sacred sexuality, with alchemy and black magic. Many yogis earned their keep as marauding mercenaries, street performers, medicine men and dream diviners (Pinch 2006). Reform-minded thinkers like Swami Vivekananda (1862–1902), however, recuperated yoga’s public image. Shorn of much of its mysticism, yoga’s goal became not deliverance but daily well-being.
More than this, they turned a tradition premised on renunciation, on turning away from the world, into an outward, centrifugal thing. Early yogis saw samadhi as a return to our natural state of bliss—a return to a primordial home port. Medieval ascetics sought ways to hasten this reverse journey. Modern yogis, by contrast, set forth into uncharted waters in search of the lucre of worldly happiness and perfection.
To this radically remade practice Americans grafted middle-class principles of willpower, ego and personal responsibility. The spirit of yoga, which had long emphasized the transcendence of the self and the society that shaped it, merged with the inimical spirit of self-improvement, a trait deeply embedded in American culture. Along the way, yoga further lost its contrarian edge, taking only cursory swipes at the constricting customs and conventions it once found so oppressive.
Which brings us to its present popularity. Yoga speaks to something innately excitable in the American cultural imagination, the seductive idea that you can improve yourself in the interest of all humanity. Stretch your legs, stretch your soul. Build a better you, build a better planet. Cosmopolitan egotism, if you will. (Incidentally, the magazine Yoga Journal recently ran a tellingly airy article entitled, “The Upside of Ego.” [Isaacs 2014].) It is this conflation of the perishable self of daily life with the absolute Self [Atman] of Indian philosophy, of personal and cosmic concerns, that has allowed Americans to make yoga authentically their own.
And yet, yoga remains much more than a brilliantly marketed form of calisthenics. Although kinetic, it offers stillness through motion through its combination of exertion and relaxation. Although self-interested, it elicits a dialogue between body and breath to which the mind has but to listen. Although utilitarian, laser-focused on results, it softens one to sensation, to the world within and without. Thus its contemporary predicament: Yoga today provides wellness, which is no small thing, but we make it speak of liberation. It is an exercise and relaxation program brocaded with religiosity. These inversions and strange couplings are the subject of this essay.
The Ascetic and the Athletic
In his bid to escape the island of Crete, Icarus flew too close to the sun. His wings, fashioned of feathers and wax, came unglued and he plunged into the sea and drowned. Classical yoga offers a similar, if inverse, imagery of lost freedom: that of a soul descending to earth and becoming entranced by the body and mind. This intimacy, it suggests, is the source of our torment. If only we could somehow pull away and recollect our radiant nature. Patanjali, in his foundational Yoga Sutras from around 400 BCE (see Patanjali and Bryant 2009), provided step-by-step instructions on how to do this. You should study scripture, stay celibate and abstain from harm. But most of all, you should meditate. And this relieves you of yourself. Precisely what happens next, after the self is transcended, is joyously indescribable (Eliade 2009; Feuerstein 2011).
This, at least, is one version of classical yoga—a deconstructive practical philosophy aimed at disentangling the soul from its mortal coil. There are other versions—monistic and dualistic—and the term “yoga” is littered throughout India’s holy texts, covering a wide range in meanings. It appears in the Vedas (1700–500 BCE), the Upanishads (500–200 BCE) and the Mahabharata (400 BCE), and seems also to have incorporated ascetical elements of non-Brahmanical, Sramana traditions (Flood 1996). Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, which is assigned widely in yoga classes today despite its bearing scant resemblance to what goes on in those classes, defines yoga as “citta-vrtti-nirodhah,” meaning mind-activity-cessation, or the cessation of the stirring of the mind (Zimmer 2008). The term comes from the root yuj, to yoke or bind together—and is generally taken to mean union with the supreme Self (called, variously, Ishvara, Brahman and Atman) in a blissful state called samadhi. “The sage yoked in Yoga soon attains the absolute,” says the Bhagavad Gita.
Samadhi is only part of the story. The bulk of classical yoga philosophy speaks less about divine union than it does about disuniting from the world. Neti, neti!—not this, not this!—is how the Vedas and the Upanishads answer questions about the nature of ultimate reality. To understand the absolute, you have to first understand what it is not, a kind of via negativa. When the sensations of form, taste, smell, sound and touch—and the desires, aversions and concepts springing therefrom—are negated, only then is the unborn Atman, “the transcendent, deathless” reality revealed, according to the Katha Upanishad (which dates sometime around the third century BCE) (Prem 1955, 190). Put otherwise, suffering ceases when the intellect is as unwavering as a flame in a windless room. Meditation, renunciation and mantras were mainstays of the art of deconditioning.
This state of affairs seemed to hold until the medieval period when yoga started arousing suspicion. This was due largely to its absorption of tantric currents (Feuerstein 1998). Classical yoga focused on the stilling of the mind; tantrism broke this icy silence. It engaged rather than shunned the senses, rechanneling libidinal energies so as to unite ecstatically with the divine. It did so because humankind was thought to have fallen so far under the spell of the flesh that the truths of existence were no longer accessible in a spiritual garb. One had to work with naked experience, so to speak, with the wellsprings of life. The body and senses thus acquired spiritual importance in what became known as hatha yoga, literally “forced union” (Koestler 1960, 85).
Hatha yoga, for instance, spoke of a dormant corporeal energy, the kundalini, coiled at the base of the spine like a serpent. When roused through physical exercises, mental concentration and breath control (known as pranayama), this libidinal power surged through the body. Along the way, it activated chakras, or centers of vital energy, up to the crown of the head where one experienced a sweet meditative bliss. (This is known as the “subtle body,” which is hidden beneath the course and gross one.) By means of the symbolic union of the kundalini—sometimes referred to as shakti, or power—and her consort Shiva, one supped at the well of pure consciousness (Avalon 1974).
This was a throbbing stoicism, an uprightness that quivered. “The Yogi’s detached alone-ness,” writes Arthur Koestler, “becomes transformed into the experience of all one-ness” (1960, 85). So acute was their perception that some yogis were said to be able to hear the grass grow. And at times, they sought to acquire supernatural power and become like gods themselves (White 2001). But apart from meditation such aims also produced all manner of postural contrivances (headstands, spinal twists) and grueling purification practices like thrusting a stalk of plantain, turmeric or cane down your esophagus and drawing it out slowly. “By this process,” says the seventeenth-century text, The Gheranda Samhita (1895, 6), “all the phlegm, bile, and other impurities are expelled” and “heart disease is surely cured.” Purgation was a necessary condition of enlightenment (if not a sufficient one). Over time, hatha yoga became associated with both extreme sensuality and excruciating asceticism (White 2011). Stories abounded of debauched yogis giving themselves over to magic and carnal joy and of self-mortifying devotees hanging upside down over fires and swinging from hooks and boring holes into their ears and tongues. Saint and sage shaded into bum and bogeyman, and back again.
It is difficult to separate legend from reality. In part, yogis conjured their own myths with their eccentric behavior. Equally, colonists and bourgeois Indians were quick to fetishize their strangeness. A Jesuit missionary in 1596 comments on the appearance of Nath yogis (followers of a mystic named Goraknath) with obvious dismay:
Of these jogis, some used their ordinary clothes made of improperly patched rags, others [were] more unclothed, others naked, and thus they showed themselves to the sight of people of both sexes, as though they were dressed in the best silks and brocades of the world […] Only one garment covered them all, and it was the ashes with which they washed and decorated their faces […] They said that they covered themselves with these ashes because everything is earth and made of earth, and so they put it over their head like a god. (Pinch 2012, 287)
In classical yoga, there is a dissection of the self and its constituent parts that is almost clinical. It is a negative assemblage. Hatha and tantric yogis extended this to the social plane. They formed cliques of wandering monastics. They were non-conformists that hovered on the margins of society, sometimes with shaved heads, sometimes with dreadlocks. They were equally at home in temples as they were in cemeteries—their stoicism an attempt to transcend the dualities that can so blinker our vision.
Performing sadhana (meditation, chanting and prayer) on charnel grounds (open air crematoria), for example, was to be confronted directly with the ineluctable reality of death and impermanence. By contemplating a bloated corpse in a state of putrefaction I am reminded that one day I too will perish. My body will also decompose, its flesh and sinews will be picked over by scavengers, and its bones will crumble to dust. Thus I learn from my cemetery contemplations not to get overly fussed by appearances and transitory things, like happiness and sadness. Instead, I focus on what matters—liberation and ending the cycle of birth and death—and on seeing the world as it really is.
Thus these “low caste faqirs and fortune-tellers,” as one British observer put it, entwined polarities and did things that were deliberately estranging (Briggs 1938, 2). Socially agnostic, they welcomed widowed women and Muslims and untouchables into their ranks, according to multiple colonial censuses. They contravened notions of purity and pollution and the social taboos that underpinned the caste system. The idea was to confront conventional habits with unconventional ones. But although they shocked people, yogis often took care of the weak and hungry and touched outcasts, lepers and the sick. They did so from a deep-seated conviction that all are equal, that the divine lives in every individual and that nothing can separate you from it. This was a practice, not a simple belief, and it is important to recognize how radical these ideas were in a caste-ridden and inegalitarian society.
So were they despised because they begged and performed magic tricks, or because they did things their own way and refused to conform to social norms?
The pruning of yoga’s tantric branches was performed by a diverse set of hands. The yoga that Swami Vivekananda (1862–1902) gave the world was clipped of reference to miraculous yogis who could enter other people’s bodies, time travel or harness the power of the sun. His aim was twofold: to reclaim yoga from conjurers and contortionists and to establish it as an emblem of authentic Indian identity. The result was a masculine religious nationalism. As he advised his countrymen, “You will be nearer to Heaven through football than through the study of the [Bhagavad] Gita. You will understand the Gītā better with your biceps, your muscles, a little stronger […]. You will understand the Upaniṣads better and the glory of the Atman [Self] when your body stands firm upon your feet, and you feel yourselves as men” (Alter 2004, 27).
The origins of Vivekananda’s vision of yoga are complex but characteristic of the age. He was born into an aristocratic family in Calcutta and was fascinated by monks from a young age, or so the legend goes. He became a disciple of the mystic Ramakrishna (1836–86) and spent much of his time in the company of the Brahmo Samaj (“Society of Brahman”), a circle of elite Bengalis that grew into something of a religious and cultural movement. There he was exposed to a variety of influences: Western esotericism and theosophy, reform Hinduism, Romantic poetry, Transcendental philosophy and, importantly, Unitarian Christianity (De Michelis 2004). At the time, there was also a burgeoning nationalist movement that confronted many of the self-serving stereotypes circulated by the British about Indians. They were seen as innately spiritual but their religion was decadent and grotesque. Barely clad yogis were a laughing stock to colonists. They had them pose for photographs that displayed their poverty: all skin and bones with matted hair and grimy faces.
The Brahmo Samaj’s reimagining of yoga incorporated and inverted this criticism, turning religion into a source of pride rather than shame. As Keshub Chunder Sen, a onetime leader of the society, put it: “We Hindus are specially endowed with, and distinguished for, the yoga faculty, which is nothing but this power of spiritual communion and absorption. This faculty, which we have inherited from our forefathers, enables us to annihilate space and time” (De Michelis 2004, 89). This mostly middle-class and Western-educated elite responded to “European colonial hegemony in a manner that reflects the influences of a Christian and nationalistic agenda” (King 1999, 69). Monism became a diffuse monotheism. It was Vedanta in a Victorian mold. Its content was vague and inclusive; it was portrayed as a kind of universal spirituality of which Indians were the experts. Vivekananda also made a point of calling yoga a “scientific” path to happiness on lecture tours in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Vivekananda castigated actual, ragged yogis and claimed to have helped rediscover a pristine yoga, Raja (“royal”) Yoga, that was unsullied by their magic-mongering accretions. A yoga that elite Indians could be proud of had no place for them, with their rank disregard of social and class conventions. While Vivekananda was not a Hindu nationalist, he regarded caste as a benign “natural order” and a “glorious social institution” (Sharma and Sharma 1996, 178). He averred that social inequality and spiritual equality were compatible. No doubt this flattered the sensibilities of the privileged.
Vivekananda speaks, moreover, of progress and power, of evolution and perfection, of controlling our inner and outer natures. We are all potential gods, he says. This is a teleology—with its forward, speed-boat propulsion—that is foreign to classical yoga. It is the language of lack and of self-help; it presupposes a deficiency that can be remedied by busy activity. Whereas the unfancied yogi dwelled in darkness, in shadowy and hidden places, Vivekananda spoke only of light and upward ascension, as if will alone were enough to reach a higher plane of existence. As Rabindranath Tagore once said of him admiringly, “If you want to know India, study Vivekananda. In him everything is positive and nothing negative” (Rambo and Farhadian 2014, 1). And this was the problem.
Indian philosophy has long found wisdom in the mingling of the sacred and sordid, the high and the low: the lotus flower blooms in the muck. It was this great dialectic that modern yoga rejected in favor of a comparatively sterile purism. (“Anything that is secret and mysterious in these systems of Yoga,” Vivekananda ([1913] 1972) urged, “should at once be rejected.”) This meant that the horribly vulgar fact of the body—that collection of flesh, blood, phlegm and bile—had to be sublimated. For how could something so filthy contain something so pure? And so it was that long-standing anxieties about sickness and decrepitude were converted into soluble questions of medicine and health. If death could not be denied it would be deferred. The body could be strengthened, even perfected.
If Vivekananda was modern yoga’s chief ideologist, then Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888–1989) was its field marshal. The yoga he designed at the Mysore Palace, where he ran a distinguished yoga school, was one for boys in the flush of youth—active, dexterous, martial (Sjoman 1996). Claiming to have mastered some 3,000 āsanas, he refined poses, put them in sequence and linked them to deep breathing. There is a silent video from 1938 that shows the great master demonstrating his craft through āsanas as suggestive as metaphors: headstands with legs revolving jointly like a lone propeller, backbends arching like mountain tunnels. And there is his simhasana, the lion’s pose, in which Krishnamacharya’s eyes roll back into his head and his tongue darts out like a snake’s. He looks like a crazed beast and you can almost hear his muted roar. While these exercises were supposed to confer any number of health benefits, there is something of the exhibitionist in his performance. The body had a special majesty, a numinous glow, and yoga was meant to coax it out.
Thus did yoga became more physical and body-oriented—athletic rather than ascetic—and turned to such unexpected sources as Western gymnastics and Indian wrestling in developing new poses. Yoga had been turned on its head. Its spiritual energies were transferred from the soul and mind to the body and senses, as practitioners believed themselves to be engaged in the material manipulation of other-worldly power (Singleton 2010). Accomplished yogis could break iron chains with a twist of the neck. They could bear the passage of carts, cars and elephants over their chests without injury. They could stop and restart their hearts at will. Muscular definition came to signify spiritual acumen. As S. Sundaram would put it in his Yogic Physical Culture: Or the Secret to Happiness (1989 [1937]: 130), “May God […] shower health and strength on all! May He create in the hearts of the sons and daughters of India a burning desire for Physical Regeneration.” Another of this ilk, K. V. Iyer, wrote in Muscle Cult that he had “a body which Gods covet” and that he was “India’s most perfectly developed man” (Singleton 2010, 122). The flesh was made spirit and the body made temple.
Western Incursions
For yoga to survive its journey to the West as a living practice it had to be transformed (Syman 2011). Thoreau was moved by its spare poetry while that international band of pedantic mysticists, the Theosophists, loved its exoticism but loathed its “nonspiritual” accretions. Ironically, as yoga was becoming more corporeal in India, many in the West turned to the practice as an antidote to a plunging feeling of existential emptiness. As Vivekananda told an audience in Calcutta in the late 1890s: “We must go out, exchange our spirituality for anything they have to give us: for the marvels of the region of the spirit we will exchange the marvels of the region of matter.” (And trade they did, largely through his Vedanta Society, founded in New York in 1894.)
But every group that gets hold of a cultural form interprets it in the light of their own traditions. It is of considerable consequence, then, that yoga laid firm roots in the fertile soil of Progressive-era America with its plucky, can-do spirit. Theodore Roosevelt (1901) was praising the “strenuous life” and urging an increasingly urbanized citizenry to “get back to nature.” The “muscular Christianity” movement had also hopped across the pond from England and its insistence on the moral, physical and spiritual beauty of man had begun to spread through the YMCA and private schools (Putney 2003). And so it was in this fecund context that flamboyant guru Pierre Bernard (1875–1955) had his celebrity and well-to-do clientele rollicking on the hills of an estate in upstate New York where he founded his “Tantrik Order” in 1905 (Love 2011). Why waste your time genuflecting before altars, he mused, when a fabulous power was at your very fingertips? As he wrote, “The trained imagination no longer worships before the shrines of churches, pagodas, and mosques or there would be blaspheming the greatest, grandest and most sublime temple in the universe, the miracle of miracles, the human body” (Bernard 1906, 105). Emphasizing tantric yoga’s erotic and theatrical dimensions, Bernard played to the crowd and displayed its entrepreneurial potential.
The spiritual and mercantile merged seamlessly in the person of William Atkinson (1862–1932), a business writer who, after 1902, was known as Yogi Ramachakra. He wrote of the “master the Universe within—the Kingdom of the Self” that could be accessed by exercising that “wonderful thing, the will” and by harnessing the “Power of the Ego.” The body was “the Temple of the Spirit” and yoga, “which deals with the physical body—its care—its well being—its health—its strength,” would return us to our “natural and normal state of health,” would keep it in clean and working order (Albanese 2008, 360–61).
Similarly, the influential Bengali Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952) wrote in his Autobiography of a Yogi (1946) that the body was like an electric battery: “I reasoned that it could be recharged with energy through the direct agency of the human will” (1946, 247). He worked at the intersection of magic and the scientific method, or rather translated the former into the language of the latter, as he stressed yoga’s healing powers through meditation and breathing techniques (pranayama). Yogananda—born into a Westernized Hindu family—claimed to be a disciple of one Mahavatar Babaji, a mysterious guru who was credited with having powers of disappearance and who might have been apocryphal. (In any case, he was one of the figures on the cover of The Beatles’ 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.) Mahavatar, Yogananda said, was in constant communion with Christ and together they sent out “vibrations of redemption” for people the world over (1946, 185). He told him to go West and spread the gospel of what he called Kriya yoga, which he did through his Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles. (Yogananda explicitly lifted Christian gospel references and passages from Emerson and wrote books titled The Yoga of Jesus (2009) and The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of the Christ Within You [2008].) In a 1924 address in Boston titled, “The Science of Religion,” he spoke anatomystically—to coin a term—of how the spirit could be disentangled from the body:
The scientific method teaches a process of enabling us to draw to our central part—spine and brain—the life current distributed throughout the organs and other parts of our body. The process consists of magnetizing the spinal column and the brain, which contain the seven main centers, with the result that the distributed life electricity is drawn back to the original centers of discharge and is experienced in the form of light. In this state the spiritual Self can consciously free itself from its bodily and mental distractions. (1974, 81)
The spell of the twin distractions of thoughts and sensations—which he likened to “telephone reports” from “gentlemen” and “lower class people,” respectively—could be broken by drawing away the “electricity flowing through the telephone wires to the central battery of the house” and by “turning off the switch” (1974, 81–82). Similarly, Shri Yogendra (1897–1989), who established his Yoga Institute in 1924, saw yoga as “science” that could “achieve psychosomatic sublimation through a system of physical culture.” In practical terms, this meant “physical education, hygiene, therapy, and biologic control of the autonomous nervous system affecting the hygiene of the mind and moral behavior.” But more than this, the exercising of “primal” energy promised longevity: “it can hardly be doubted why any man following the yoga code of controlled biological living should not live more than a hundred years” (Albanese 2008, 367–68). Recast as a rational pursuit of health and well-being—however pseudoscientific it may seem—yoga began moving from the margins to the mainstream.
This turn was greatly assisted by B. K. S. Iyengar (1918–2014). Sickly and “parasitic” in his youth—his words—Iyengar turned to yoga as a healing cure, and specifically to his brother-in-law, Krishnamacharya (De Michelis 2005). He took to it with feverish devotion—once tearing his hamstrings while using bricks to force his knees to the ground—and his convalescent years forever left an imprint on his teaching. He made of yoga an exacting kind of physical therapy, with an emphasis on balance and precision. His Light on Yoga ([1966] 2005) became an international bestseller. Elegant and dense, the book’s every page featured photographs of āsanas accompanied by directions and explanations of each pose’s therapeutic benefits—a how-to manual you could turn to on creaky winter days. He wanted to restore you to your body: “Many moderns use their bodies so little that they lose the sensitivity of their bodily awareness. They move from bed to car to desk to car to couch to bed, but there is no awareness in their movement, no intelligence” (Iyengar 2006, 28).
By addressing immediate symptoms and pointing to deeper cures, Iyengar positioned yoga somewhere between palliative and panacea. At its higher levels, he believes it to be a form of meditation in motion, a way of experiencing “the self which is hidden within oneself.” (He chafes at suggestion that āsana practice is somehow spiritually inferior to seated mediation.) As he writes, “The life of man is not only the conjunction of prakti (the sheaths of the body) and purusa (the soul), but also a combination of these two. Yoga is a means to utilizing the conjunction of prakti and puruṣa for freedom and beatitude (mokṣa), as the two are interwoven” (Patanjali and Bryant 2009, ix). The path to the spirit leads through the body, and back again.
All the while, yoga retained its patina of spirituality. Yogi Bhajan’s Healthy, Happy, Holy Organization helped revive its meditative undercurrents for the hippies and the counterculture (Williamson 2010). Maharishi Mahesh Yogi acquired celebrity status in the 1960s through his association with the Beatles and his propagation of a simple, silent mantra meditational practice called, and eventually trademarked as, Transcendental Meditation. The 1965 immigration act, moreover, opened doors to yogis near and far, many of whom settled into retreats on the California coast. Swami Muktananda visited the United States and spoke about “meditation revolution” and inward bliss. He, like other gurus, was alive to the slippage between self (you) and Self (Atman, Brahman) and was not shy about exploiting it. “Honor your Self, worship your Self, meditate on your Self,” he told listeners in a pastiche of domesticated tantrism and New AgeChristianity. “God dwells within you as you” (Jain 2014, 190). Muktananda brushed his devotees’ heads with a wand of peacock feathers during initiation rituals to quicken their awakening. Less fantastic but equally expectant versions of spiritual realization found a home in the Esalen Institute—started in 1962 in Big Sur, California—with its focus on the realization of human potentialities, which helped integrate yoga into the growing Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability industry, a market segment that attracts mostly upscale consumers interested in socially conscious and holistic living (Kripal 2008). What was once contrarian became accessible and agreeable.
Even Bikram Choudhry, the yoga mogul who relentlessly asserts the superiority of his trademarked sequence of postures in lawsuits and brash boasts about the robustness of his testicles—“I have balls like atom bombs, two of them, 100 megatons each. Nobody fucks with me”—is a puritan at heart (Fetterman 2006). Although he reportedly owns a fleet of some 40 Rolls Royces and Bentleys, the Calcutta-born yogi to the stars expounds regularly on the virtues of delayed gratification: “Would you rather suffer 90 minutes or 90 years?” And while he calls his hothouse studios “torture chambers”—the heat is cranked up to 105 degrees—the fundamental point is to teach that grueling labor is rewarding and redemptive. You are sweating yourself clean, morally and physically. Nor does today’s yoga stamp out or transmute desire as in the past. In true middle-class fashion, it responsibly reins it in. A friend tells me of a yoga class in which students chant the chorus to the Rolling Stone’s “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”—a mantra for an age of austerity.
Yoga’s bourgeois proclivities are further evidenced in a row surrounding Lululemon Athetica. The company, a leading purveyor of upscale activewear for women, recently committed what many regarded as yoga sacrilege. It had to do with its signature, reusable shopping bags. One side featured silhouettes of various āsanas. The other bore the enigmatic question, Who is John Galt? In contrast to the uncomplicated messages of cheer and uplift it normally prefers (“Dance, sing, floss and travel”), the slogan was lifted from Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged. An odd match: Rand’s deification of freewheeling self-interest would seem to clash with the yogic values of compassion and agapic love. But according to Lululemon founder, Chip Wilson, Rand’s vision inspired his “quest to elevate the world from mediocrity to greatness,” and helped shape the company ethos. Wilson also made headlines for his remarks about a line of the company’s pants that became dangerously sheer, almost see-through, with use. The fault, he explained, was not in their make but in the make of the wearers: they were too large and ungainly for the pant’s lovingly crafted specifications. As Wilson put it, “Frankly, some women’s bodies just don’t actually work.”
Scoff though one might, the company is now valued at $10 billion, and is proof that yoga has become a very profitable business (Philip 2009). This, of course, coincides with its growing popularity, as an estimated 20 million people now practice it in North America. If anything, yoga now runs the risk of spiritualizing capitalism: There are now seminars in “mindful leadership” at the World Economic Forum in Davos, yoga classes are a staple of corporate life and there is a suggestive overlap between the neoliberal ethos of flexibility and yoga’s supple movements. Colluder and conspirator, company man and whistleblower, yoga revitalizes the body and mind and readies us for another bout of work.
Gravity and Grace
Iyengar once defined the aim of yoga as freedom from the afflictions of the body and mind. This is a charmingly classical definition. It does not tell us what yoga is for, but rather what it is against: principally, the ill health and mental agitation that so corrode our lives. And apart from some basic ethical guidelines having to do with nonharm, it does not tell you what to do with your renewed life. Eventually, yoga got a more positive specification as New Age, alternative medicine, and self-help currents all posed questions for which yoga was to do the solving. It was then captured by consumerism. There is yoga for anxiety and arthritis, for constipation and colds, for men (“broga”) and migraines. Yoga’s magic as a kind of a consumer elixir is that it wrests us from the frenzied activity of daily life only to contribute to that fevered pace through its plethora of cures.
It is fair to ask, under such circumstances: What remains of yoga? What, if anything, is “authentic” about it? Unsurprisingly, there are struggles over definition. Some, for example, have sought unsuccessfully to remove yoga from California’s P.E. curriculum on the grounds that it smuggles foreign idolatry into the classroom. Others complain that it is not religious enough, that Hinduism has “lost control of the brand.” And still others lament the way consumer capitalism resolves the demands of a philosophy of liberation into the clarity of self-help homilies for the haute bourgeoisie (and into discount yoga DVDs for the petit bourgeoisie).
But if you insist on purity then you’re liable to see pollutants everywhere. What these varied critiques share is a nostalgia for a yogic past that cannot be fully known, let alone retrieved. And so we are left with a miserable, anxious, neoliberal present in which we are estranged from each other and ourselves. And with a yoga whose appropriations cause us to flush with embarrassment, and whose standardized, one-size-fits-all forms deplete its ability to heal broken bodies and to stay tittering thoughts.
Yet this same practice ends up reenchanting people’s lives, if only as a splendid parenthesis in an otherwise busy and stressful day. How? The brilliant irony of modern yoga is that the very concepts it introduced into the practice, such as ego and will, are undermined by its methods. Through a kind of inverted Cartesianism, it gently subordinates the meandering mind to breath and physical exercises. The authority of the anxious ego, with its retinue of psychosomatic ailments, is unsettled by a system of wise movements. Since its inception, attention to breath has been a central aspect of meditation (White 2011). As American instructor Joel Kramer puts it, “The proper use of breath gets you out of your mind and into your body, bringing a grace and sensuality to movement impossible when the mind is in control” (1980, 15). This echoes the sentiments of Jnaneshvar (1948, 102), a thirteenth-century poet, who described yoga as an “action of the body in which reason takes no part and which does not originate as an idea springing in the mind […] To speak simply, yogis perform actions with their bodies, like the movements of children.” In each āsana there is an anti-philosophy that gives rise to visceral intuitions.
The Gheranda Samhita (1895), a seventeenth-century haṭha yoga text, says there are as many āsanas, or poses, as there are living species, which it estimates at 8,400,000. Among these are āsanas after the lotus, lion, fish, curlew, peacock, tortoise, sea monster, frog, tree, eagle, bull, locust, dolphin, camel and snake. By emulating other beings and qualities (“hero,” “perfect,” “gentle,” “dangerous”), you are meant to realize experientially the more rarefied teachings about the permeability of self and other. As the Bhagavad Gita has it: “The man whose self is disciplined in yoga […] sees himself in all creatures and all creatures in himself” (Gandhi 2010, 139). To understand the curlew, elephant and camel āsanas, the Yoga Sutras advises, simply watch how those animals sit (Patanjali and Bryant 2009, 284). There is a concrete awareness of the world, a relaxed attentiveness.
The guru Desikachar has a saying: “Do not kill the instinct of the body for the glory of the pose” (Scaravelli 1991, 22). You should therefore approach āsanas by circular movements rather than angular thrusts, by subtle stretches instead of harsh jerks. Indeed, the overzealousness of practitioners is a leading cause of yoga-related injuries. Despite the tough-love hectoring of certain instructors—“Grab your foot […] No one’s going to grab it for you!”—there is a check on the purpose-driven individualism of the American tradition that is inherent to yoga. Push too hard and you will hurt yourself.
Bruce Lee says the beauty of kung fu is that it’s intrinsically self-justifying; it needn’t be useful, it needn’t be for anything. I wonder if the same holds for yoga, and if the excessive utilitarianism that it has been pressed into—the constant serving of ends of whatever kind—isn’t somehow corrosive or distorting, even if its effects are measured by the New Age variables of empathy and wellness.
In this respect, there’s a lovely pan-Indian concept, Līlā, according to which God created the world not with a sense of purpose or plan but out of exuberance. Creation was free and spontaneous, a kind of divine gratuitousness that generates joy and pain. It is in a similar spirit of play, some have noted, that a child builds a sand castle, wrecks it and then starts again. She does so without attachment, with careless generosity. This is all well and good for a child or a god, you may say, but there is suffering in the world. The strength of any philosophy worthy of our devotion is thus its ability to deal constructively with distressing and pungent realities. Yoga may not be able to reclaim its purity, for it has long been entangled with the profane world, and such a chase always leads to disappointment, if not worse. But it can recover its antinomian and antic grace.
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