Yoga in the United States

Ralph Waldo Emerson was influenced by the Bhagavad Gita.

Long before yoga arrived in the United States, pioneering thinkers began to assimilate Indian thought.[2] Among the first was the poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1857 he published a poem, "Brahma", in the first issue of literary magazine The Atlantic Monthly, which he had helped to found. The work contained the lines "I am the doubter and the doubt, I am the hymn the Brahmin sings."[3] Emerson was expressing the Hindu philosophy of non-duality, Advaita. He had studied among other Hindu scriptures the Bhagavad Gita, in which Krishna instructs Arjuna in yoga. Emerson was mercilessly[4] mocked, and 26 parodies of the poem were published within a month of its appearance; Americans were starting to engage with Hindu philosophy.[5]

Henry David Thoreau, too, read translations of Hindu texts, quoting frequently from the Bhagavad Gita, and attempted meditation during his ascetic life – itself an indication of how strongly he was influenced by those texts – in the forest at Walden. Stefanie Syman argues that he deserved the title of Yogi.[6]

Another pioneer was Madame Blavatsky, co-founder in 1875 of The Theosophical Society in New York, her philosophy blending several Asian traditions.[7][8] She repeatedly over the course of six years stressed the importance of Patanjali's system of yoga, before travelling to India and Ceylon and astonishing the American public by suddenly converting to Buddhism, a tradition that Syman notes was even more deeply despised in the 19th century United States than Hinduism.[7][8]

Swami Vivekananda brought yoga to the United States in 1893, but rejected the practice of asanas.

In 1893, Swami Vivekananda gave several lectures at the Chicago World Parliament of Religions.[9] The event effectively marked the start of yoga in the United States, and the birth of modern yoga as a transnational movement. It was followed in 1896 by his popular book, Raja Yoga.[10][11] He taught a mixture of yoga breathwork (pranayama), meditation, and the distinctively Western idea of positive thinking, derived from the new thought movement. Like other high-caste Hindus and British colonial officers in India at the time, he explicitly rejected the practice of asanas and hatha yoga.[12]

Ida C. Craddock became interested in yoga and tantra late in the 19th century, a time when Americans were questioning Christian orthodoxy while others were struggling to uphold it. As a woman, and the creator of a system of techniques to enhance sexual pleasure, she came under attack. Among her sources was the Shiva Samhita and in particular its account of Vajroli mudra, involving delayed ejaculation and the practised uptake of sexual fluids through the penis. She further enraged religious fundamentalists by asserting that God was a third partner in a sacralized sexual union, and in 1899 by creating a Church of Yoga. She was convicted and imprisoned in New York in 1902 for obscenity and blasphemy. The yoga scholar Andrea Jain comments that this marked the start of a split between a modern, physical yoga that celebrated the body, and a more traditional meditative practice that, like Vivekananda's yoga, essentially shunned it.[13]

Pierre Bernard in lotus position, 1939. He brought attention to yoga but caused the public to associate it with trickery and magic.[14]

Another controversial figure, Pierre Bernard, brought yoga to the notice of a suspicious American public, but despite persecution managed to attract a modest following of eccentrics, including his nephew Theos Bernard. He learnt yoga from a tantric yogi, Sylvais Hamati, a man of mixed descent who had managed to reach Lincoln, Nebraska, apparently from Calcutta. Hamati taught Bernard a combination of asanas including lotus position and headstand, purifications (shatkarmas) including dhauti, and breath control (pranayama).[15] In a celebrated exploit, he used his skill in pranayama to simulate death (Kali mudra): a physician, in front of a crowd of witnesses, was unable to feel his pulse.[16] Bernard and Hamati created a Tantrik Order, shrouded in an exciting degree of secrecy, with seven levels of initiation involving mantras, asanas, pranayama, and doctrine.[17][18] Offended onlookers described it as "lust, mummery, and black magic".[19] Eventually in 1918 Bernard moved to Nyack, New York, creating an "esoteric country club for 'Tantriks'" supported by wealthy backers including some of the Vanderbilts. Club members learnt hatha yoga, which Bernard assured them would increase their enjoyment of life's pleasures, and were treated to "opulent circuses" and other entertainments.[18]

Swami Satchidananda opening the Woodstock Festival in 1969

From 1918, Pierre Bernard and his wife Blanche DeVries ran yoga studios for women, offering a combination of spiritual practices including tantra, traditional Indian medicine, and Vedic philosophy. They influenced American perception of yoga for the next century, combining athleticism, the exotic, sexuality, and a willingness to separate religious practices from their source religions.[14][49][50][51]

American yoga again took a turn towards the spiritual in the 1960s. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi spread his Transcendental Meditation across the United States in the 1960s, and then worldwide.[9][52] The Indian spiritual master Swami Satchidananda came to the United States in 1966, founding the Integral Yoga institute in Virginia, and in 1969 opening the Woodstock festival.[9][53] A Harvard professor, Richard Alpert, travelled to India as a pilgrim. He came back to the United States as a guru named Ram Dass, and in 1970 toured its university campuses, encouraging a lifestyle of spiritual search, supported by his book Be Here Now.[9][54]

In 1975, the yoga teacher Judith Lasater and others founded Yoga Journal; from small beginnings it became American yoga's journal of record.[55][56] In the 1970s and 1980s, however, yoga was seen by Americans largely as just another form of exercise, alongside aerobics and jogging, and it was practised by a small minority. Its image changed when in 1989 the yoga teachers Sharon Gannon and David Life opened a New York studio for their explicitly spiritual Jivamukti Yoga. Asanas were practised in front of images of deities, accompanied by music.[57] By 2009, Lisa Miller could write in Newsweek "We [Americans] are all Hindus now".[58] She quoted the scholar of religion Stephen Prothero's description of America's "divine-deli-cafeteria religion", where people feel free to pick and mix yoga, Catholicism, and Buddhist retreats, if the combination works for them.[58] The historian Catherine Albanese argues that American metaphysicals have constructed a "new and American yogic product" in which the body itself is a vessel for the spirit.[59] The journalist Stefanie Syman notes that effortful yoga has a Protestant streak, as it is both "an indulgence and a penance."[60][61]

Yoga commercialised: a store in Connecticut, 2013, with yoga clothing and poster

By 2016, according to an Ipsos study, 36.7 million Americans were practising yoga, making the business of classes, clothing such as yoga pants, and equipment including yoga mats worth $16 billion, compared to $10 billion in 2012. Some 72 percent of practitioners were women.[62]

The historian Jared Farmer noted that if the yoga-practising population were a religious group, they would easily exceed the number of American Hindus, Muslims, atheists, Mormons, and Jews put together.[63] Farmer identifies 12 general trends in yoga's history in the United States from the 1890s to the 21st century:

peripheral to central; local to global; male to (predominantly) female; spiritual to (mostly) secular; sectarian to universal; mendicant to consumerist; meditational to postural; intellectual to experiential; esoteric to accessible; oral to hands-on teaching; textual to photographic representations of poses; contorted social pariahs to lithe social winners.[64]

Considering all these trends, Farmer stated that modern yoga as exercise belonged to Srinivas Aravamudan's category of the "global popular",[64] which Farmer glossed as "a postcolonial realm of religious cosmopolitanism."[64]

In Lasater's view, American yoga in the 21st century has lost "the gentleness, consistency, and direction of the practice",[65] replaced by ambition. Lasater believes that many Americans "have conflated asana with yoga."[65] Schrank, reviewing the literature in 2014, noted that the journalist William Broad's The Science of Yoga, "lambasted mercilessly by the American yoga community",[66] however took yoga seriously as therapy for mind, body, and spirit.[66] Schrank describes the situation of yoga in the United States as "a complicated dynamic between transnational history, cultural appropriation, and therapeutic science". Schrank notes that none of the books she reviewed addressed the feminist, class, or racial aspects of American yoga, even though most practitioners are women and few are from minority ethnic groups.[67]

• Yoga in Britain
• Yoga in Germany
• Yoga in Russia