This is not a lecture about individual women and their isolated successes. Rather this talk aims to acknowledge the collective wisdom rising from a (mostly) female-driven phenomenon, which I will refer to as Modern Globalised Yoga, a term coined by Dr Elizabeth de Michelis.
Historical research tells us that Yoga has never been one thing, one practice nor one path. Yoga as both practice (i.e., a structured system) and a soteriological goal has been malleable. Indeed, to fully understand the meaning of Yoga at any given time, the most important consideration is that of context, context, context! Over the centuries, the continued success of Yoga has been in its ability to be different things to different people. Yet, the common feature that has given the concept of Yoga endurance has been the structures which offer an individual a set of practices that aim at an extraordinary psychosomatic experience (an altered outlook and/or experience of reality), which then transforms one’s relationship with both the sense of self and suffering. No wonder it is so appealing.
In the last 100 years, Yoga has taken a transnational leap from a guru-lineage pedagogy to a teaching profession. In doing so, individuals have had to re-assess the foundations of ethics, scope of practice, income-sources and the social positionality of its custodians. Although the forefathers of pre-modern Yoga were most certainly male, often ascetics and located in what is today called south-Asia, the qualities and demographics of Modern Globalised Yoga are a near exact dichotomy: 21st-century (mainly) female householders that are flourishing in a contemporary globalised meeting place of post-consumerism, feminism and new-age spiritualism.
This talk will touch on some of the cultural and social levers effecting yoga teachers and practitioners, and it will highlight some of the historical and contextual issues that are shaping the structures of Modern Globalised Yoga. One aim will be to identify future archetypes: the artisan, the ascetic, the lineage-holder, the neo-health professional, the academic
Jason will discuss the research he is currently doing on Yoga, which involves visiting libraries in various countries to view manuscripts of Yoga texts. He’ll discuss some of the important Haṭha- and Rājayoga texts he’s working on, in particular, their content, who wrote them and their audience. ...
Glimpses of what evolves into Yoga can be gleaned from early sources: the loving attention paid to animals and the seated seemingly meditative figures in the seals of the Indus Valley (ca. 3000 B.C.E.) as well as the invocation of tapas (purifying heat) in the Vedas (ca. 1500 B.C.E.). The naming ...
The yogic world of medieval India was dominated by the Nath Yogis, whose poetic and mythological traditions were remarkable for their rich and varied imagery. One such image represented the head and torso of the yogic body as a set of wells, the one turned downward and the other upward. Here, t...
