Post-lineage yoga

The ethnographer and yoga scholar-practitioner Theodora Wildcroft introduced the term "post-lineage yoga" to describe a contemporary form of yoga practised outside any major school or guru's lineage.[1] She defines it as follows:

[Post-lineage yoga] rejects the idea that any individual yogic text or modern alignment paradigm can hold complete universal truth, and rejects unquestioning allegiance to a single deity in the form of a living or historical figure. It rejects the common practice of attributing any harm caused within the practice to defects in the practitioner, and seeks to re-situate the practice in community, and socio-political contexts. Post-lineage yoga is a re-evaluation of the authority to determine practice, and a privileging of peer networks over pedagogical hierarchies, or saṃghas (communities) over guru-śiṣya (teacher-adept) relationships.[2]

Wildcroft cites the yoga teacher and author Matthew Remski's statement that with the deaths of the pioneering gurus of modern yoga as exercise, such as Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, B. K. S. Iyengar, and Pattabhi Jois, individual yoga teachers, often women, are reclaiming the practice through their communities, resisting commercialisation and modernity more generally.[3][1] Wildcroft describes the people she observes as "unusually dedicated, even obsessively reflexive about the practice of yoga"[1] compared to the casual practitioners who go to a weekly yoga class for exercise and social contact. She mentions Angela Farmer as an instance of such a radical practitioner; Farmer trained in Iyengar Yoga, moving away from it to become "one of the most influential"[1] teachers of the "divine feminine" approach to yoga, and on the way inventing the yoga mat; she has taught for over 50 years. Wildcroft sees Farmer's relative lack of media coverage as a sign of the wider overlooking of yoga culture outside the defined lineages.[1]

Remski noted that some yoga gurus have been disgraced, including Bikram Choudhury.[3] More generally, in his view, a "great man's" death "erodes the Great Man Story, leaving space through which more hidden stories may emerge".[3] Remski gives the example of Vanda Scaravelli, whom he describes as one of Iyengar's few female pupils who were not intimidated by him; he writes that she taught few students, "one at a time", and that all of them have "gone on to influence yoga for decades without grandiose institutes, certification programmes, or even websites".[3]

The scholars Agi Wittich and Patrick McCartney write that the image of contemporary yoga is the idealized, fit, young, slim, white, female yoga body, commercialized on the covers of glossy magazines such as Yoga Journal, and that non-lineage yoga evolved in reaction against that image.[4] The scholar of religion Amanda Lucia locates the post-lineage yoga movement in the contemporary anxiety with the authenticity of religious experience, part of a search for a practice that works for the individual, sometimes by using elements of premodern spirituality, sometimes by taking on religious or ascetic practices such as yoga.[5] The scholar Helen Collard describes her own "severe disillusionment" with Pattabhi Jois in her practice of his Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga, and "more broadly with top-down, patriarchal yoga forms".[6] She states that she has come to consider her practice as "post lineage" in Wildcroft's terms.[6]

The yoga teacher Charlotte Martinus, writing in Om Magazine, states that many leading yoga teachers in Britain are women who trained in a lineage, but "have circumvented the egoic and authoritarian ways of 60's yoga idols to create a haven of peace, tranquility, sisterhood and a creative yoga lifestyle — accessible and inclusive to everyone of all abilities, gender and race."[7] She writes that the women who run these post-lineage yoga groups "dominate the scene with their fiery, insightful and inspiring teachings".

• Wildcroft, Theodora (2020). Post-Lineage Yoga : from Guru to #metoo. Sheffield: Equinox Publishing. ISBN 978-1-78179-940-6. OCLC 1152054676.