A couple of years ago, as I was experiencing the initial aftershocks of my second Saturn returns, I decided it was high time to start taking yoga classes again. The last time I had taken a yoga class was about thirty years before that, during my first Saturn returns, as a matter of fact. Throughout that long span of time, I had maintained a daily practice that included a number of yoga postures, but until my universe really started shaking again, I hadn’t honestly thought about taking yoga seriously.
Well, I do now. This time around, I was ready—maturity has to offer some benefits. But then yoga as it’s practiced and promulgated in America is a very different creature now than it was in the late 1970s, too. For one thing, several new and rather eclectic styles of yoga have come into existence. For another, the emphasis on gurus has diminished significantly. Back in the 1970s, I observed a lot of guru worship that just really turned me off. Oh, and there are just a lot more people practicing yoga and a lot more places to practice. I have found that it’s easy to shop around for a variety of experiences with body, mind and spirit that are all forms of yoga.
It came as no surprise to me that in the same year, three quite remarkable and very different books about yoga in America appeared on virtual and physical bookstore shelves. I’ve read them all in the last year and offer this review to help you decide if you want to read any or all of them. Observing convention, I have listed them above in alphabetical order by author’s last name. However, since I read them more or less in the reverse of that order, I will write about them as I encountered them.
I began reading Stefanie Syman’s The Subtle Body sometime last summer and picked away at it over the next few months. That was not a consequence of any problem with the book but rather of the extreme disruptions to my usual reading practices that I experienced as I moved from one living situation to another and then to yet another. Fortunately, she wrote the book in a way that made it possible for me to dip into and out of it without losing a sense of the whole.
Syman attempts to cover the evolution of yoga in America from its “discovery” as a philosophical system by the Transcendentalists (most notably Emerson and Thoreau) to its relatively recent explosion in popularity, with a contemporary focus on Bikram Choudhury (founder of the practice that bears his name), Sri K. Pattabhi Jois (founder of Ashtanga Yoga), and Sharon Gannon and David Life (founders of Jivamukti Yoga). This is honestly a very ambitious undertaking, and Syman’s actual text is limited to less than three hundred pages—although more than fifty pages of end notes, a full bibliography and a decent index follow the text. Her approach is largely chronological, with each chapter focusing on a significant development in this progression.
What I found particularly interesting in The Subtle Body was Syman’s detailed and largely sympathetic examination of the Green Acre retreat center founded in 1894 and located not far from where I live, in Eliot, Maine. Based on notes taken by some of the women who attended programs at this center, Syman concludes that Swami Vivekananda, who often spoke at Green Acre, was indeed teaching attendees about yoga, or at least about the contemplative aspects of yoga. Vivekenanda was also apparently a big hit with the largely female audiences who heard him speak at the World Parliament of Religions held as part of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.
Syman also devotes chapters of The Subtle Body to Pierre Bernard (see my comments on The Great Oom later in this review), to Pierre’s nephew Theos, to Swami Prabhavananda and the Hollywood yoga scene, and to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whose Transcendental Meditation opened the door to Eastern spirituality, if not actually to yoga, for many Americans in the 1960s.
A very small number of black and white photographs appear in an insert following page 182 in the hard cover edition of The Subtle Body that I reviewed. These are primarily pictures of some of the people responsible for bringing yoga to America, including the aforementioned founders of the more prominent contemporary schools, as well as some of the more notorious practitioners of Eastern spirituality, among them Ram Dass and Timothy Leary, not to mention the Beatles.
While all three of these books are meticulously researched, Yoga Body is the only one I would call a scholarly monograph, by which I mean a book whose primary intended audience is other scholars rather than the general public. I discovered Yoga Body because it was on the reading list for the yoga teacher training program in which I participated for a few weeks earlier this year. (That, dear reader, is a whole other story.) Our mentor raved about this book but warned us that it was challenging. She was right about that! I have a PhD and have read my share of scholarly books and articles, and I will admit that even I had trouble making my way through this book.
Mark Singleton teaches at St. John’s College in Santa Fe and–not surprisingly–also teaches yoga. He acknowledges in the Introduction to Yoga Body that he undertook the research that informs the book in preparing a PhD thesis at the Dharam Hinduja Institute of Indic Research in 2003-2004. His sources include published and unpublished documents from India, Europe and the Americas, dated from the seventeenth century to the present.
Singleton’s argument, simply stated, is that the postural exercises most of us now recognize as yoga were not part of the ancient Indian philosophical traditions at all. Referring to the writings of Europeans who traveled to India in the Middle Ages, Singleton notes that they observed itinerant holy men who engaged in various challenging postures intended to elevate their consciousness and attract onlookers who might give them food or money. But these men were regarded with “…hostility and suspicion” (36) by their contemporaries. Singleton provides convincing evidence to demonstrate that these attitudes persisted into the late nineteenth century, when “contortionists” of both Western and Eastern origin performed in sideshows, vaudeville, and on street corners and town squares.
Singleton makes liberal use of popular magazines, pamphlets and other artifacts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to suggest some of the other origins of the postures we now regard as yoga asanas. I am always fascinated by the ways that cultural practices are altered during the process of assimilation into another culture, and so I found this section of Yoga Body most enlightening. He refers extensively to the rise of interest in “physical culture” in Europe and the United States starting around the fin de siècle. He argues that the adoption of body-based yoga by Indian yogis in large part reflects the influence of the British occupation of India and of efforts by Indian nationalists to assert their readiness for independence by demonstrating their physical prowess.
Singleton traces the postures that we now call asanas to sources that include the gymnastics introduced by Ling (a Swede) and Bukh (a Dane) earlier in the nineteenth century, the bodybuilding practices developed by the Prussian Eugene Sandow, and the physical education programs of the YMCA, which became well-established throughout India in the first decades of the twentieth century. According to Singleton, the swamis who toured in the United States and attracted followers who traveled back to India in their wake rather creatively melded these embodied activities with the philosophical teachings that were part of their own cultural heritage.
The narrative text of Yoga Body runs just over 200 pages and includes extensive and generally informative photographs liberally placed throughout the text. These are captioned and sourced. Like the other books featured in this review, Yoga Body also includes detailed end notes and an exhaustive bibliography.
What immediately distinguishes The Great Oom from the other two books in this review is that it is a biography rather than a broader historical overview. The title refers to a rather derogatory name given by a hostile media to Pierre Bernard, one of the founders of yoga in America. Although I am not usually a big fan of biographies, I really enjoyed this book, read it cover to cover and have spoken about it to several yoga friends. It’s that good, and by good I mean both well-written and very thought-provoking.
Pierre Bernard was born Perry Baker on October 31, 1876 in a very small Iowa town. He lived nearly eighty years and traveled extensively around the US but never actually went to India—unlike his nephew Theos. Somehow young Baker managed to find a teacher in Lincoln, Nebraska, a traditional Tantric yogi named Sylvais Hamati. As Perry Baker morphed into Pierre Bernard (his mother’s second husband’s last name), he studied Vedic philosophy, pranayama (breathing techniques) and advanced physical culture (yoga asanas) under Hamati’s tutelage.
In 1893, when Perry was still in his teens, he and Hamati moved to the west coast together. Just three years later, Bernard (already bearing his preferred name and calling himself a professor) created a sensation by demonstrating a death trance to groups of physicians. During his trances, members of the audience inserted long surgical needles through his ear lobes, nostrils and cheek, causing him to bleed slightly but apparently not to experience pain. This self-hypnosis made such an impression that Bernard was soon earning a very decent living training medical doctors in the technique.
But that was only the beginning of a career that saw Bernard move from the west coast to the east, rise and fall and rise again in notoriety, earn and spend and lose lots of money, and provide training and inspiration to more than a generation of yogis and other spiritual seekers. Despite numerous widely publicized scandals and more than a few brushes with the law, Bernard managed to convince several very wealthy followers (among them members of the Vanderbilt family) to lend him their considerable financial and moral support.
With these resources and others, Bernard began purchasing property in Nyack, New York. There he and members of his company established a retreat center which came to be known as the Clarkstown Country Club (the CCC). Over the roughly thirty years it was in operation, this facility provided a venue for spiritual masters from India and elsewhere, served as an economic engine for the local community, and gave Bernard with a platform from which to launch a variety of loosely-related enterprises, including a zoo and a baseball team. Programs offered at the CCC included lectures, yoga classes, costume parties and circuses.
The Great Oom is a great romp through the busy and highly entertaining life of a man who was simultaneously a complete rascal, a consummate politician and businessman, and a genuine spiritual philosopher. Reading it, I discovered that Bernard’s kid sister Ora Ray Baker married the Sufi leader Hazrat Inayat Khan and thus became the mother of Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, the leader of the Sufi Order of the West, which in a later time period established Omega Institute, a direct descendent of the CCC in terms of its purpose and influence. I also learned that a very young Pete Seeger lived at the CCC with his parents for five years. The physical therapist Ida Rolf studied with Bernard, as did the flamboyant conductor Leopold Stokowski.
Each chapter of The Great Oom, which runs nearly 350 pages sans end notes and other appendices, opens with an archival photo in some way descriptive of the narrative in that chapter. About the only missing visual I would have liked to see in this book would have been a map of the Nyack properties, perhaps drawn in a way that showed how they expanded and contracted over time. Like the other books in this review, The Great Oom includes detailed end notes, a bibliography and an index.
A journalist by profession, author Robert Love insists (and I believe him) that The Great Oom is a factual account of Bernard’s fascinating life, based on primary source materials, including “documents, diaries, memoirs, lecture notes, and transcribed interviews” (xii). I would point out that Bernard reinvented himself many times and was well known for taking considerable liberties with descriptions of his background and his qualifications. So much of his real story remains a mystery.
I found it quite remarkable that these three books, all published during the same year, all written by Westerners, all carefully researched and all ostensibly on the same topic, approach that topic in very different ways and hardly overlap at all in their sources or emphases. Yet all three make the clear point that the physical practice of yoga as we know it now is a relatively recent arrival in the States. They concur that many early attempts to popularize this form were met with great resistance by mainstream observers, who were suspicious of its roots in Eastern spirituality and who equated it with lifestyles characterized by eccentricity and debauchery. I feel a lot of admiration for the first and second generations of American yoga teachers who were willing to venture into this realm without a lot of the support and encouragement that is available to today’s entrants.
In my casual conversations with people before and after yoga classes, I have observed that most of them are pretty clueless about the origins of this practice. Reading these books has enhanced my knowledge of and appreciation for the activities I experience in yoga classes and their effects on me outside of class.
(Viking, 2010)
(Oxford University Press, 2010)
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)
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