#136 Stefanie Syman - The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America

Stefanie Syman author of The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga
in America


The stages of evolution | In 1898 it was crazy and scandalous for
whites | Theos Bernard | Vivekananda | Indra Devi makes it more
normal | Staying away from metaphysics | Making yoga palatable
for the West | Differences in UK | Yoga in the 60s | Psychedelics
| The Beatles | Gurus & ashrams | 1970s | Therapeutic yoga |
Marshmallow yoga | Transition to Ashtanga & Bikram | Asana as
a Trojan horse | What is next for yoga? (more about Stefanie
below)


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Stefanie is an author and company builder. She’s practised
(mostly) Ashtanga Yoga for 25+ years. She is the author of The
Subtle Body, The Story of Yoga in America


Yoga's history in America is longer and richer than even its most
devoted practitioners realize. It was present in Emerson's 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 neighbourhood 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-9/11.


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 yoga's rise is absorbing and
often inspiring - a major contribution to our understanding of
our society.