Mark Singleton

Salvation through Relaxation: Proprioceptive Therapy and its Relationship to Yoga

Relaxation constitutes a primary feature of yoga as it is taught in the West today. However, typical modern practices have no precedent in the pre-modern yoga tradition, but derive largely from techniques of proprioceptive relaxation developed in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and America. These techniques (along with their assumptions of the soteriological value of relaxation) in turn alter the theory and praxis of yoga itself, such that its fundamental enterprise is significantly modified. Does a transformation constitute a development or merely a corruption of the yoga tradition? This article considers the extent to which Modern Yoga fills the cultural space once occupied by ‘relaxationism’.

Suggestive Therapeutics: New Thought's Relationship to Modern Yoga

Modern, transnational yoga in the early twentieth century often defined itself in terms and ideologies borrowed from the popular current of esoteric American Protestantism known as New Thought. Like its forebear Transcendentalism, the New Thought movement was itself receptive to Indian ideas, albeit radically reworked to fit the doctrine of divinised self-hood and cosmic healing that it purveyed. Such adaptations were dialectically reabsorbed by exponents of the yoga renaissance, in a mutually reinforcing, cross-cultural rewriting of the theoretical bases and practices of yoga. New Thought provided a convenient and familiar spiritual lexicon with which to convey the arcane truths of yoga to Europeans, Americans and (increasingly) modern Hindus. The result was a new understanding of yoga in terms of the cult of positive thinking, personal power and affluence, and health through perfect harmony with the universe.

Transnational Exchange and the Genesis of Modern Postural Yoga

This chapter will explore the emergence of posture practice (āsana) as the primary facet of yoga in the modern, globalized world. Prior to the modern period, āsana was rarely treated as the principal aspect of a yoga sādhana. In the medieval systems of haṭhayoga, from which it is sometimes claimed that today’s popular forms derive, posture was subordinate to other practices, such as breathing (prāṇāyāma), purification (kriyā), concentration (dhāraṇā), and sound work (nāda). During the 1920s and 1930s, postural yoga began to be assimilated into the modern yoga project begun by Vivekananda. Perhaps most importantly, Shri Yogendra and Swami Kuvalayananda developed postural systems greatly informed by Western science and medicine, and by the international physical culture movement. Over time, āsana became modern, scientific, and legitimate in the eyes of the world, thanks to their efforts and to those of others, such as Tirumalai Krishnamacharya. Āsana also interacted and partially merged with Western traditions of therapeutic gymnastics, “spiritual” movement and dance, while shedding many of the esoteric aspects and bizarre practices of the original haṭhayoga.