Author: Stefanie Syman
File Type: epub
In The Subtle Body, Stefanie Syman tells the surprising story of yogas transformation from a centuries-old spiritual disciplineto a multibillion-dollar American industry.Yogas history in America is longer and richer than even its most devoted practitioners realize. It was present in Emersons New England, and by the turn of the twentieth century it was fashionable among the leisure class. And yet when Americans first learned about yoga, what they learned was that it was a dangerous, alien practice that would corrupt body and soul. A century later, you can find yoga in gyms, malls, and even hospitals, and the arrival of a yoga studio in a neighborhood is a signal of cosmopolitanism. How did it happen? It did so, Stefanie Syman explains, through a succession of charismatic yoga teachers, who risked charges of charlatanism as they promoted yoga in America, and through generations of yoga students, who were deemed unbalanced or even insane for their efforts. The Subtle Body tells the stories of these people, including Henry David Thoreau, Pierre A. Bernard, Margaret Woodrow Wilson, Christopher Isherwood, Sally Kempton, and Indra Devi. From New England, the book moves to New York City and its new suburbs between the wars, to colonial India, to postwar Los Angeles, to Haight-Ashbury in its heyday, and back to New York City post-911. In vivid chapters, it takes in celebrities from Gloria Swanson and George Harrison to Christy Turlington and Madonna. And it offers a fresh view of American society, showing how a seemingly arcane and foreign practice is as deeply rooted here as baseball or ballet. This epic account of yogas rise is absorbing and often inspiringa major contribution to our understanding of our society.From Publishers WeeklyYoga conquers Americaand is conquered in its turnin this labyrinthine cultural history. Journalist Syman traces American enthusiasm for yoga back to Thoreau and follows it through cycles of waxing and waning popularity it was decried by Victorians for its association with madness and tantric sex rituals, celebrated in the 1960s for its association with altered states of consciousness (and tantric sex rituals), and ubiquitously embraced in the 21st century as a wholesome, anodyne exercise program. The author argues that, even as the om-chanting adept became the embodiment of spirituality, yogas mainstreaming risked the discipline losing its rich spiritual content, along with the more extreme contortions, regular enemas, and whatever else Americans considered off-putting. Unfortunately, the authors attempts to clarify yogas spiritual content, which is multifarious and intractably murky, dont always succeed, and sometimes the narrative bogs down amid barnstorming swamis and their squabbling sects. When she pulls back to view the culture mashup yoga has becomea cure for back pain, a beauty regime, and a route to Godshe gives a cogent, engrossing analysis of this Asian-born spiritual practice turned all-American panacea. 8 pages of b&w illus. (June) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. From BooklistSyman begins her embracive and illuminating history of yoga in America by discussing how polymorphous a practice yoga has become. From an age-old spiritual tradition in India designed to enable disciples to gain mastery over their bodies to attain the divine, yoga has morphed over the last century and a half into a form of exercise so mainstream, people performed yoga poses on the White House lawn during Easter celebrationsa sight no one would have imagined when yoga first scandalized Americans with its frank approach to every aspect of physical life, from breathing to sex. From Thoreau, the first American yogi, to the earliest yogis from India in America, including the influential Swami Vivekananda who arrived in 1893, Syman profiles a great array of colorful yogis and yoga teachers while chronicling with remarkable knowledge and wit all the permutations yoga has undergone. Of particular pleasure and discovery are Symans coverage of yoga in Hollywood, the profound social changes propelling the union of yoga and psychedelics in the hippie era, and the yoga for success of more recent vintage. --Donna Seaman