12. Ruth Westoby | Women and Gender in Yoga

In this episode, we speak with Ruth Westoby (PhD Candidate, SOAS)
about her background in Ashtanga, her doctoral research on women
and gender in the history of yoga, female practitioners of Haṭha
yoga and asceticism, frameworks for understanding the yogic body,
rajas and bindu, as well as a preview of her upcoming online
course, YS 111 | Women and Yoga: A History of Female
Practitioners.

Speaker Bio

Ruth Westoby is a doctoral candidate at SOAS, University of
London, researching for a doctoral thesis on the yogic body in
premodern Sanskrit texts on haṭhayoga, under the supervision of
Dr. James Mallinson. 


As well as offering workshops and lectures at studios and
conferences, Ruth teaches on some of the principal teacher
training programmes in the UK and beyond. She facilitates
Yogacampus’ online History of Yoga course and serves on the
steering committee for the SOAS Centre of Yoga Studies.


Ruth is also a longtime Ashtanga practitioner. She began to
explore yoga practices in 1996 and started teaching postural yoga
in 2004. In 2010 she received an MA in Indian Religions from SOAS
with Distinction. In 2016-17 Ruth collaborated with the Haṭha
Yoga Project’s ‘embodied philology’, interpreting postures from
the 18th-century Haṭhābhyāsapaddhati, an important textual
precursor of modern yoga. The film has been showed as part of the
Haṭha Yoga Project’s Embodied Liberation exhibition in
2020.

Links


https://soas.academia.edu/RuthWestoby 

http://www.enigmatic.yoga

YS 111 | Women and Yoga: A History of Female Practitioners