Modern Yoga

Finished reading A History of Modern Yoga by Elizabeth de Michelis. I love the title of her concluding chapter: "Modern Postural Yoga as a healing ritual of secular religion." Here are some selected quotes:

"... the term 'secularization' refers, in a general sense, 'to the gradual decline of [institutionalized] religion as a consequence of the growth of scientific knowledge and [to] the continued diversification of social and ethnic groups in the Occident' ([Fuller, 1989]). All of these elements would be especially prominent in conditions of 'urban living', and it is in such environments that MPY grows and thrives. Adopted and cultivated in conditions of marked privatization and relativization of religion, MPY is successful, like other Harmonial belief systems, because it provides 'experiential access to the sacred'.
Such experiential access to the sacred, epitomized by the 'secular ritual' of the MPY practice session, represents the third key to understanding the current success of MPY, along with its fitness and de-stressing applications...
Thus the MPY session becomes a ritual which affords various levels of access to the sacred, starting from a 'safe', mundane, tangible foundation of body-based practice... there is room for the practitioner to decide whether to experience her practice as 'spiritual' or as altogether secular. Except in cases of thoroughly utilitarian (fitness or recreational) performance, however, some notion of healing and personal growth is likely to provide the deepest rationale for practice."

"Health is religious. Ill health is irreligious." (BKS Iyengar)

De Michelis' book is a thorough and thought-provoking look at a discipline that repeatedly emphasizes experience over knowledge. Because of this, the book is inescapably written from an 'etic' (outsider's) perspective, but is nonetheless empathic to the 'emic' views of yoga practitioners. What I have learned is that far from being a claptrap religion cobbled together to fill the void left by science, Modern Yoga was carefully crafted by a series of Indian intellectuals in a reverse mission to the West that began in the 19th Century. More recently, BKS Iyengar initiated the Modern Postural form of yoga, with its emphasis on the practice of asana poses. It came out of an expression of his own experience of yoga and his artistic creativity, carefully setting up the structure of the yoga session that has become a framing ritual for many Americans and people around the world.