Yoga--Philosophy for Everyone by Fritz Allhoff

Author:Fritz Allhoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-09-01T16:00:00+00:00

History

Visualizing the long robes, large bellies, and untamed hair of popular Indian gurus who arrived in the United States to teach Westerners the principles of a yogic life in the 1960s and 1970s makes the current yoga-glam movement appear new – one more avenue for our hungry market. Yet the initial ties between Hatha yoga in the West and a manufactured, slender appearance emerged before these gurus’ arrival. The relationship between yoga and a thin body also has roots outside the West – as far back, in fact, as yoga’s inception as an ascetic tradition.

In 1919, Pierre Bernard and his counterpart, Blanche DeVries, opened a yoga studio in Manhattan, and later a retreat center in upstate New York, where the teachers instructing asana classes were disproportionately thin and attractive.1 Meditative Raja yoga was also afoot in the United States via teachers such as Swami Vivekananda. It was Hatha yoga, however, that drew a larger audience. In 1937, Pierre’s half-nephew, Theos Bernard, hit the national newspaper and radio scene with an extraordinary capacity to contort his body and an appearance that recalls a bulk-less Arnold Schwarzenegger. A decade later, Indra Devi, the tiny, Latvian student of Sri T. Krishnamacharya, followed her guru’s directive to teach and established a small Hatha yoga studio in Hollywood.2 There is no evidence that Devi advertised Hatha yoga’s purpose as weight loss or beauty enhancement; these benefits, however, were soon impressed upon an image-conscious Los Angeles public. Devi’s clients included several celebrities.

Swami Prabhavanda – a Vedenta Swami who held a strong, moderately sized Los Angeles audience in the 1930s and 1940s – denounced Hatha yogis as ‘the Olympic athletes of spiritual attainment.’3 Interestingly, Georg Feuerstein uses the word ‘adamantine’ – which translates to unbreakable – to describe what even early Hatha yogis were attempting to do with their bodies. According to Feuerstein, Hatha yogis set out to ‘bake the body’4 of physical limitation; not to live into their nineties, nor to secure an exalted appearance, but to ‘withstand the onslaught of transcendental realization.’5 The goal of early Hatha yogis, then, was to clean the body of impurities so it could function as a viable ground for enlightenment. Taken from a Judeo-Christian perspective, which berates the body of its savage needs from atop the mind’s moral tower, this goal is ripe for exploitation. A ‘baked’ body that is pure, cleaned out, and chastened replicates residual Puritan beauty ideals all too well. When I was seventeen, I bought a copper pendant carved with an image of the skeleton Buddha (who I thought was a skeletal monk) and wore my rust-colored totem around my neck for four years. To me, this ribbed, half-robed monk, who displayed unrivaled mastery over the insistent demands of a fleshy body, was the absolute image of my hunger for, and feeling of, beauty.

Though the ascetic yogis of India, who carry a long and respected renunciant tradition, are not out to thin or tone their bodies for appearance’s sake, their emaciated state portrays a capacity

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