#97 – Keen on Yoga Podcast with Dr Jason Birch

Jason Birch (DPhil, Oxon) is a senior research fellow for the
‘Light on Hatha Yoga’ project, hosted at SOAS University of
London and the University of Marburg.


Jason is also a visiting researcher on the Suśruta Project at the
University of Alberta. He is well known for his important paper
on the meaning of haṭha in early Haṭhayoga, which has reshaped
our understanding of the origins of this term by locating it
within Buddhist literature. His dissertation focused on a seminal
Rājayoga text called the Amanaska.


Through extensive fieldwork in India and the reconstruction of
primary sources, Birch has identified the earliest text to teach
a system of Haṭhayoga and Rājayoga, namely the twelfth-century
Amaraugha. His most recent publication has defined a corpus of
Sanskrit and vernacular texts that emerged during Haṭhayoga’s
floruit, the period in which it thrived on the eve of
colonialism.


Jason has published articles in academic journals and critically
edited and translated six texts on Haṭhayoga for the Hatha Yoga
Project 2015–2020; taught Masters courses and Sanskrit reading
classes at SOAS and given seminars on the history of yoga for MA
programs at the Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice, Won Kwang
University in South Korea and Loyola Marymount University, Los
Angeles.


He is a founding member of the Centre of Yoga Studies SOAS and
the Journal of Yoga Studies, and combines his practical
experience of yoga with academic knowledge of its history to
teach online courses with Jacqueline Hargreaves on The
Luminescent.