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. He will focus mainly on the aspects of these premodern Yogas which might interest practitioners of modern Yoga and how an understanding of the history can change one’s perspective on what Yoga can be.
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...
Yoga's increasing popularity in America today is due to its promises of health, fitness, longevity and stress reduction, as introduced by a variety of Indian yoga gurus in the 20th c. In India, the land of its birth, the goals of yoga have been more radical forms of "embodied philosophy" includin...
