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The Meaning of Yoga: a Conversation with Stephanie Syman and Doug Groothuis Monday, September 20, 2010

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The Meaning of Yoga: a Conversation with Stephanie Syman and Doug Groothuis Monday, September 20, 2010 http://www.albertmohler.com/2010/09/20/the-meaning-of-yoga-a-conversation-with-stephanie-syman-and-dough-groothius1//9 AlbertMohler.com The Meaning of Yoga: A Conversation with Stephanie Syman and Doug Groothuis Monday, September 20, 2010 Thinking in Public (This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated) Mohler: Stefani Syman’s articles on technology, media, and culture have appeared in a number of periodicals ranging from the Wall Street Journal to Vogue and the Village Voice. She has also been featured in two documentary films and in 1995 she co-founded Feed an award winning independent web magazine. She is the author of the book The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America. The book was published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux earlier this year and it is one of the most interesting books I’ve read in a very long time. Stefani Syman, welcome to Thinking in Public. Syman: Thanks for having me. Mohler: This book was so compelling as I read it because what I really love to find just in terms of even avocational fun reading is a book that tells me a story that has never really been told this way before. No one has actually traced the history of yoga in America and its quite a story. How did you get to it? Syman: Well about fifteen years ago I began practicing yoga myself and as you mentioned I was running a web magazine, one of the first, and so I was a kind of student of culture and at a certain point not long after I began practicing yoga I realized I wanted to know how yoga had become so popular in the U.S. I mean after all it’s an ancient spiritual discipline which originated in India and here it was, you know, yoga schools all over the city in New York where I live, many people who I would have never thought would take a yoga class in their lives becoming committed practitioners so I really wanted to answer the question-how did this happen? Mohler: And you do answer it and as you set up this story you really get to I think the question many of us would ask and that is how did something as exotic as distant from American culture as deeply embedded in Hinduism as it is, come to be accepted even in 19th century America? Syman: Yeah, I really try to understand how that happened and it didn’t happen instantaneously although as soon as Americans like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau began reading books about Indian philosophy and about yoga they really were quickly attracted to it and as we know those two were quite open minded in their thinking to begin with and eclectic in their sources and so when Emerson started reading these books including the Bhagavad-Gita which is one of the first yoga scriptures he found it enormously compelling and he incorporated many of the ideas he found there in his own work and his poetry and essays. He wasn’t very interested in practicing yoga but Thoreau was and he really began to practice it as far as he could understand it from these books. But you know starting from that moment you can kind of see this dance that happened where people-some generations of Americans really wanted to take on yoga as a whole spiritual discipline which includes physical practices but is really aiming toward spiritual realization and others in later generations find that those elements make them uncomfortable and so kind of strip out the spiritual dimension and really focus on the physical part of the practice. Accessed on 2010-10-04 http://www.albertmohler.com/2010/09/20/the-meaning-of-yoga-a-conversation-with-stephanie-syman-and-dough-groothius2//9 dimension and really focus on the physical part of the practice. Mohler: Now one of the things you document in your book is that the acceptance and interest that was directed towards yoga was tied to such movements as transcendentalism as you identified it with Emerson and Thoreau and later with new thought and you know in the history of religious movements in America you go to the 19th century and a lot of these movements especially with new thought really caught on in some unexpected places. For instance amongst the very well educated and the rising middle class and as I look to your book it seems that that’s a part of this story too. Syman: Very much so. I mean new thought, you know, which has permeated many, as you say, many different religious movements in the U.S. got its start, really got steam under it at the turn of the century and it was kind of at the moment that yoga began to be taught here in America by Indian swamis so it was no longer just in the book it was real teachers coming and teaching this practice to Americans and one of the first moments that this happened was in 1894 at a summer spiritual retreat in Maine called Green Acre and new thought leaders were there too and so from that moment on really yoga was pretty closely linked to new thought and I do think you see ideas from yoga and Hinduism more broadly that are kind of imported into new thought starting in the 19th century and the turn of the century and other swamis addressed new thought meetings from then on. Mohler: Yeah, you have figures like Vivekananda and others who came and so was it that Americans had to import the, so to speak, experts to teach yoga? Syman: Well it really helps I mean yoga is a very, first of all, very heterogeneous practice, there are a number of different types of yoga, Hatha yoga is the one many Americans are familiar with which really has the poses and puts more emphasis on physical practices but there’s Karma yoga, Bhakti yoga-the yoga of devotion so and then the test which describes yoga are very coded and symbolic and meant to be transmitted from guru to disciple and that was where a lot of the information and the instruction was given so it really made a huge difference when Swami Vivekananda came in 1893 and began teaching a year later and then many other swamis followed including Paramahansa Yogananda in the early twenties and Prabhavananda a little bit later and these swamis really had experience of learning yoga from gurus in India and could transmit it more effectively but you know very quickly there began to be American gurus and Pierre Bernard was one such figure he began teaching yoga really as early as the turn of the century. Mohler: Now you have yoga in America today and if you follow that progression and there are some very interesting figures and characters and movements that are involved in the story as you tell it, we arrive at some contemporary questions that you really address in your historical records so let me throw some of those questions out at you here. Can you separate the say, the physical aspect of yoga from its spiritual foundation in Hinduism? Syman: Well first of all yoga is not just part of Hinduism you know it’s part of Buddhism and Jainism too so it’s, and Hinduism is pretty, it’s a term that was applied pretty late in the game to a really diverse Indian religious practices so the answer is in some ways yes since yoga isn’t really owned by a single religion and as a practical matter what people have done is sort of take pieces of it. The physical poses, the breathing exercises, meditation and really practiced them in the context of their own faiths or in kind of a more secular way. I do think it begs the question of what you get when you do that because yoga has very specific aim and slightly different theologies depending on what type of yoga you practice and with what philosophical system its associated with. Mohler: Well when you look at your record it’s clear that Americans, pretty much as we do with everything, began to act more or less as consumers when it came to yoga and it’s really clear that there are people who are interested more in this aspect and others in another but you talk about the fact that the big story here clearly is that from just a kind of interesting vantage point of looking at the American psyche something happened that a practice so bizarre by say normal 18th and 19th century American standard so distant from the worldview of most Americans of that time could become well to fast forward to the year 2010 something that’s a six billion dollar a year industry involving literally millions of people. That still seems to be a strange story to me. Syman: Well I think what this is at the kind of core of what makes yoga so powerful in America in a sense which is that you can use your body to transcend mundane existence so even if you’re just using practicing yoga as a form of exercise, in the back of your mind you know that if you perhaps pursued it further there’s this whole other dimension, this rich field of possibility of transforming your body and having spiritual realization by using your breath and your body right now here in this life and I think that promise whether or not many people ever take advantage of it or attempt to get Accessed on 2010-10-04 http://www.albertmohler.com/2010/09/20/the-meaning-of-yoga-a-conversation-with-stephanie-syman-and-dough-groothius3//9 those deeper layers of yoga is what really makes it so appealing.
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