The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America » (First Edition)

Stefanie Syman, a literature graduate of Yale, was a founder of Feed, an early, award-winning Web magazine. She has written for The Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, Vogue, and Yoga Journal. A native of Los Angeles, she lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and has practiced yoga for fifteen years.

In The Subtle Body, Stefanie Syman tells the surprising story of yoga’s transformation from a centuries-old spiritual discipline to a multibillion-dollar American industry.

Yoga’s history in America is longer and richer than even its most devoted practitioners realize. It was present in Emerson’s New England, and by the turn of the twentieth century it was fashionable among the leisure class. And yet when Americans first learned about yoga, what they learned was that it was a dangerous, alien practice that would corrupt body and soul.

A century later, you can find yoga in gyms, malls, and even hospitals, and the arrival of a yoga studio in a neighborhood is a signal of cosmopolitanism. How did it happen? It did so, Stefanie Syman explains, through a succession of charismatic yoga teachers, who risked charges of charlatanism as they promoted yoga in America, and through generations of yoga students, who were deemed unbalanced or even insane for their efforts. The Subtle Body tells the stories of these people, including Henry David Thoreau, Pierre A. Bernard, Margaret Woodrow Wilson, Christopher Isherwood, Sally Kempton, and Indra Devi.

From New England, the book moves to New York City and its new suburbs between the wars, to colonial India, to postwar Los Angeles, to Haight-Ashbury in its heyday, and back to New York City post-9/11. In vivid chapters, it takes in celebrities from Gloria Swanson and George Harrison to Christy Turlington and Madonna. And it offers a fresh view of American society, showing how a seemingly arcane and foreign practice is as deeply rooted here as baseball or ballet.

This epic account of yoga’s rise is absorbing and often inspiring—a major contribution to our understanding of our society.

The Barnes & Noble Review

I'm sure I'd been told that my 3-year-old son's preschool offered yoga, but I had forgotten until one day, several weeks into the school year, when he plopped down on the living-room rug, twisted himself into a passable lotus position, took in a deep breath, and uttered a drawn-out "peace" on the exhale. Journalist Stefanie Syman opens The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America with a moment that provided her with her own proof of yoga's triumph over our culture: the inclusion of yoga workshops at last year's White House Easter Egg Roll. "Our goal today is just to have fun," Michelle Obama said in her welcoming remarks. "We've got yoga, we've got dancing, we've got storytelling." The fact that this review covers two new releases on the topic is further testament to the current domination of yoga, which has endured long periods of ill-repute throughout our history.

While Syman's admirable book takes a broad look at yoga's journey to the mainstream, Robert Love's The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America focuses on a riveting slice of that story, tracing the life of Pierre Bernard, the freethinking yogi who, though largely forgotten today, was a fixture in the tabloid press in the early 20th century for operating a notorious ashram in Nyack, New York.

Introduction 3

1 Brahma? 11

2 Thoreau's Experiment 26

3 The Guru Arrives 37

4 Swami Vivekananda's Legacy 62

5 The Making of an American Guru 80

6 Theos Bernard's Spiritual Heroism 116

7 Margaret Woodrow Wilson "Turns Hindu" 143

8 Uncovering Reality in Hollywood 160

9 Hatha Yoga on Sunset Boulevard 179

10 Psychedelic Sages 198

11 How to Be a Guru Without Really Trying 233

12 Marshmallow Yoga 256

13 The New Penitents 268

Notes 295

Selected Bibliography 359

Acknowledgments 365

Index 367