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

Keen on Yoga Podcast

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.