The Subtle Body - 9780374236762

"The Subtle Body is an enthralling book, and an enlightening one."---Robert Thurman

"Stefanie Syman's superb book fills a major gap in our understanding of religion in America. This fascinating account, full of colorful characters, demonstrates the importance of yoga in transforming Americans' understanding of the body. Any survey of American religious history must take this narrative into account."---Randall Balmer

Stefanie Syman tells the surprising story of yoga in America---the story of this ancient spiritual discipline's transformation into a practice now synonymous with a healthy body.

Yoga's history in America is longer and richer than even its most devoted practitioners realize. Today, the arrival of a yoga studio in a neighborhood is a signal of cosmopolitanism, and yoga can be found in school gyms, malls, and hospitals. But yoga was once thought to be a dangerous, soul-corrupting practice. In Syman's telling, this change in yoga's fortunes is an enthralling story of the American genius for creative adaptation. Syman reveals yoga as it was practiced in Emerson's New England and traces the rise of a pursuit that was fashionable among the leisure class by the early twentieth century. She introduces us to charismatic yoga teachers who ardently promoted the practice and to their students, who recognized yoga as both a challenge to our worldliness and practicality and a natural expression of our ideal of individual self-fulfillment. It was through the efforts of these teachers and students that yoga took root in America.

The Subtle Body tells the stories of many of yoga's greatest advocates, including Henry David Thoreau, Pierre A. Bernard, Margaret Woodrow Wilson, Christopher Isherwood, Sally Kempton, and Indra Devi. From New England, the narrative moves to New York City and its 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. It takes in celebrities from Marilyn Monroe, Gloria Swanson, and George Harrison to Christy Turlington and Madonna. Along the way, Syman dramatizes the tension in modern yoga between spiritual enlightenment and physical attainment---between religion and exercise---so that the story of yoga in America becomes the story of our efforts, as a people, to transcend ourselves.

The Subtle Body is a book of unprecedented scope, insight, and reading pleasure---a major contribution to our understanding of yoga and of American society today.