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Fall 1993

NAMASTE,

This year, 1993, marks the centennial of yoga in America. Although some Americans (most notably the Transcendalists, including Thoreau and Emerson) had been studying Eastern thought through sacred texts such as the Bhagavad Gita since the mid-1800’s, the formal introduction of yoga to America is generally considered to have occurred when Swami Vivekananda addressed a wildly enthusiastic gathering at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in September, 1893. For the next several years he traveled around the country lecturing and teaching Raja Yoga to an increasingly interested public. This introduction led to a stream of yogis and teachers from the motherland of yoga, India. There was a yoga boom in America in the first two decades of the twentieth century, another in the late sixties and early seventies. Another boom is currently underway as evidenced by increasing enrollment in yoga classes around the country and the appearance of articles about yoga in a vast assortment of magazines and newspapers nationwide.

The first two eras of expansion resulted primarily from the aforementioned arrival of teachers from India. The latest is much more an internally generated phenomenon, fueled by the health interests of an aging population and guided to an increasing extent by American teachers.

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During this year’s Memorial Day weekend I had the good fortune and privilege to attend and teach at Unity in Yoga International’s conference celebrating One Hundred Years of Yoga in America. Unity in Yoga is an organization founded in 1983 whose purpose is to provide a framework for deeper understanding and mutual appreciation of yoga and the many paths that lead to it.

There are a lot of different approaches to yoga, some seemingly contradictory in their methods. Since yoga practitioners and teachers are human beings (an astonishing fact I noted in the last newsletter), these differences are occasionally the subject of acrimonious and competitive disagreement. Unity in Yoga attempts to provide an opportunity for people from a variety of paths to understand their differences in an atmosphere of tolerance and respect and to see the underlying truths which they inevitably share.

The conferences, which are held every two years in North America and occasionally abroad, are designed to provide such a forum. Founders, teachers and practitioners of different methods and systems offer classes and workshops to present their various techniques. Panels and seminars are held to discuss not only differences, but questions and problems that are shared by all. These conferences are always, in my experience, joyful and loving events. They truly serve their function of bridging the ultimately superficial differences that exist and create a sense of unity and friendship.

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One aspect of the conference that had overriding significance for me this time was the sense that yoga in America has truly come into its own. All the teachers who helped bring yoga to America, from Vivekananda 100 years ago to many of the luminaries that graced the stage at the opening ceremonies of the Unity in Yoga conference 100 years later, have done their work of planting and nurturing the seeds of this wonderful art and science very well. Its roots have burrowed deep into the fertile American soil, its trunk grown tall, its limbs spread wide.

Like any living organism, the tree of yoga, to use Mr. Iyengar’s metaphor, has been affected by the climate and conditions in which it has grown. Thus while yoga in America has many of the same characteristics of the parent organism, it is developing its own unique qualities that allow it to thrive here and which in turn reflect this environment.

Many of the classes and panels at the Unity in Yoga conference dealt with some of the adaptations that are occurring and some of the problems and questions that result. These revolve around essentially two broad and somewhat overlapping categories: lifestyle and philosophy.

One issue having to do with lifestyle concerns the role of ashrams and spiritual communities in America. Their place in our society is quite different from that in India. Our society’s attitudes, fears and prejudices sometimes make living in such a setting and still relating to families specifically and society generally a real challenge. Also the problems of making the transition from living in a spiritual community to living in the world at large are very difficult for many of the people who decide to leave. Several discussions revolved around these problems and how to deal with them.

The student/teacher relationship and underlying issues concerning authority and control were considered at the conference. As readers of this newsletter know, this is presently a topic of prime concern to teachers and students of yoga in America. The differences between the basic Eastern model in which the teacher is the unquestioned authority and the pupil surrenders to that authority completely and the Western model in which the student retains a certain level of autonomy and decision-making power led to some very interesting exchanges from both viewpoints.

Standards of sexual behavior and morality differ substantially between East and West, and the issues that this raises for American yoga practitioners provided the substance for a lot of discussion. Questions concerning intimate relations between students and teachers, the role of sexuality and sexual energy in the practice of yoga, and the challenges of and attitudes toward marriage and divorce and their relationship to spiritual practice all came up in these discussions.

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Matters concerning healing, medicine and psychology are often handled differently in the East and the West. These differences have an impact on how yoga practitioners relate to these disciplines in their respective cultures. A variety of classes examined some of these differences in both practical and theoretical terms.

Questions concerning money and yoga were also explored. Yoga classes and centers are, for the most part, a capitalistic endeavor in America. This is not always so in India. How much of the business of yoga is business, cultural and individual attitudes toward business and money, and how that relates to the practice and teaching of yoga were all topics that were discussed in and out of formal seminars.

As you can see, I have not tried to deal with the specifics of the issues raised at the conference and again here in this newsletter. My intention is rather to delineate some of the areas where yoga in America is taking on its own character, developing its own personality as it were, yielding a fruit of slightly different taste and texture than its predecessors. Nevertheless the timeless human questions and the fundamental answers that the perennial philosophy of yoga provides remain the same from century to century, from culture to culture. It is within the quest to confront these age old questions that the diverse paths of yoga reveal the underlying unity in Yoga.

One of the teachers most responsible for the growth of yoga in America and for the current boom in its popularity is my teacher, B.K.S. Iyengar. Indeed the Yoga Journal in a recent article, “Yoga in America: the First 100 Years” states, “Probably the name most often associated with yoga in America is Iyengar.” Most of the faculty and I are heading off to Ann Arbor, Michigan shortly to attend the American Iyengar Yoga Convention. Mr. Iyengar will be there. We’ll tell you about it when we get back.

May the leaves on your trees be especially beautiful this autumn.

       

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