Review: Yoga Body – Mark Singleton

Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice – Mark Singleton
Oxford Press. 2010. 262pp. 9780195395341.

When most people think of yoga they get an image of people stretching, and posing, and breathing deeply. If you mention that yoga is a religious tradition most are confused, and some know that and either think that the religion has been stripped out of it, or that the Gods care how flexible you are. If you mention that the idea of yoga as being this physically focused system of stretching is less than a hundred years old then suddenly people get irate. People have a surprisingly vested interest in the historical authenticity of posture yoga, even when they’re doing it strictly for physical purposes.

This book challenges all of that, by examining medieval yoga texts, and modern yoga and fitness texts from the last century and a half Singleton manages to illustrate the best and most comprehensive history of modern Western yoga. He starts with the bold assertion that “there is little or no evidence that āsana (excepting certain seated postures of meditation) has even been the primary aspect of any Indian yoga practice tradition – including the medieval, body-oriented haṭha yoga.” ((3)) He then moves on to show that not only was this posture-based focus not included in traditional yoga, but it was considered backward and superstitious.

The book follows the complex dialectical history of yoga to the modern portrayal. Initially there is focus on the lack of focus (or mention) of physical postures in the traditional yoga texts -including the ones that are often sweepingly claimed to validate posture yoga like Patañjali’s yoga. Then slowly he builds an intricate picture that set the stage for posture-based yoga to arise. He moves into the confusion between fakirs and yogins to the Europeans (largely the British) and how that started a feedback loop. Around the turn of the 20th century there was an international obsession with fitness, various schools of acrobatics, gymnastics, and bodybuilding appeared at that time, and as India was under British rule it was caught up in this craze.

Singleton shows how the name yoga was appropriated or co-opted into this physical culture, starting off as more of a body-building system, and then into gymnastics and stretching, all the while moving farther away from the traditional yoga. I should clarify that Singleton doesn’t consider modern yoga as wrong, false, disconnected, or anything like that -though he may criticize the bad history involved- instead he states that modern yoga is just a natural progression of the system. While I completely agree with all his research and his analysis, I can’t agree with the conclusion. What yoga has become was not shaped by spiritual or cultural progression, but cultural oppression and colonization. What is thought of as yoga was created by an interaction between British laws outlawing yoga, European contortionism, and Swiss gymnastics. I cannot agree with the premise that it is a natural progression or part of the same continuum, I feel it is more of a deviation than a development. This is not to say I have no use for modern yoga, only that I recognize it as a modern system with no basis in historical yoga, and a physical practice. That being said this book is extremely well researched, well documented, and deeply analyzed (a nerd’s dream) and if you’re interested in yoga one way or another, I recommend you pick it up, and draw your conclusions from the research.

Birthdays, New Years, & Blackholes

Happy New Years! Don’t tell me it’s still two weeks away, for me the new year starts here and now. Today, Decemember 17th, 26° of Sagittarius, the day the Sun is Conjunct the Supermassive black hole in the centre of our galaxy, is my birthday. It’s a great day, it’s a holy day that sadly isn’t listed on most people’s calendars, but what greater day is there than the one which I was born on?

Want to talk about spiritual realities and miracles? That’s what birthdays are. To be very Sagan/Delenn/Hindu, I am the Cosmos. All of reality from that primordial chaos has led up to my existence, I’m a distillation of All-that-Is into a specific form. A changing form. The blue baby (I was dead and dark blue) that was born all those years ago is gone, not just grown up, but nothing of that child remains. Every cell and particle that made that child has been expelled and new ones absorbed. Same thing with that form that graduated high school, all gone, perhaps even all of the self that started University. It’s amazing, I am the result of billions of years of physical, chemical, biological, and spiritual evolution. Billions of years of likely and unlikely and nearly impossible events have all led to me. When you really, really think about that reality every day should be celebrated as a miracle, but the birthday perhaps above all.

My birthday starts my new year, or my transition into it, it’s never clear, but doesn’t matter much. Since my birthday is two weeks before New Years, and between them we have Solstice, Christmas, Boxing Day and general winter break, it’s an odd time that’s somewhat removed from the rest of the year. So I celebrate myself through that period, and prepare for the new year to clearly start on the 1st. In this time I cease my strict adherence to my daily magickal practice, now is when I see if what I’m doing is still helpful, or just habit, and by the 1st I will have refined my daily practice. It’s something I recommend to everyone from time to time. I know it’s hard to break a habit, or resume if you stop your practice, but how much of your magickal daily practice is because you’ve been doing it that way for a while, does it serve you? Take a break, a week or two, and see how you feel without it.

Now I’m lucky to have an awesomely placed birthday for this, but again with all the holidays and events in the next two weeks it’s a good period for a lot of people to take this break. It’s also, because it’s this amorphous nebulous spot in the year, a great time for magick moving forward. Everyone knows I love the half-light, the between places, the twilight periods. It’s not quite this year, but it’s not next year, so now is the time to perform your magick to spread in the following year.

I have had a whirl-wind school year, and hopefully in my time off I’ll get some more blog posts written (thanks to those who asked, and sorry for those expecting the rest of the skrying posts) and book reviews done. But for now I celebrate. I’ve had one of my favourite comfort foods for breakfast, with cake, later I will have sushi, later I will have a baconado, but all day long I’m celebrating the miracle that is me. (And if you want to celebrate me too, go right ahead, I suggest many blue things, cheese and bacon, and nag champa incense as traditional parts of the festivities.)

Happy birthday! May this day be filled with copious amounts of bacon, cheese, and blue awesomeness.