The Yoga History Podcast

In this special introductory episode, we’ll give you previews of upcoming episodes as well as a taste of how we’ll be approaching yoga history. This podcast doesn’t follow a linear historical narrative. That is not an accident. Yoga is complex and follows a number of trajectories, each with its own unique values, beliefs, and practices. This season, we'll begin to explore a few of them, taking some unexpected twists and turns along the way.

Yogis are often imagined as apolitical, detached visionaries and dreamers, but that has not always been the case. Only 250 years ago, armed bands of mercenary yogis roamed the plains of Northern India, terrorizing, looting, and murdering traders and merchants in numbers sufficient that in the early 1800s the British made it illegal to look like a yogi. Well, that is what the British officers in India would have us believe anyway. The truth is a little more complicated.

You may recognize the name matsyendrasana. It is an elegant-looking twist named after a legendary early medieval hatha yogi, Matsyendranath. This is a story about a tantric trailblazer who learned yoga directly from Shiva while living inside the belly of a fish. This episode will leave you wanting to investigate stories of all the yogis who have poses named after them.

Early twentieth-century yoga in America had no shortage of characters, but there is no better place to start than with Blanche DeVries. It is important to highlight the role of women in yoga history, but that is not the only reason to include her story on this podcast. DeVries is the first American yoga teacher and she opened the world’s first yoga retreat center in 1918. She was actively teaching yoga in New York State for over seventy years before her death in 1984 and played a bigger role in the shaping of modern yoga than most of us realize.

There is probably no more iconic figure in the history of modern yoga than this early twentieth-century yoga visionary. His story is a complicated blend of mythology, politics, nationalism, and athleticism. At once an innovator and a traditionalist, many of the postures we associate with yoga today were cooked up in the gymkhana kitchen at the Jaganmohan Palace in Mysore. Learning about yoga today without knowing about Krishnamacharya would be like learning about cars without talking about Henry Ford.

There is probably no more iconic figure in the history of modern yoga than this early twentieth-century yoga visionary. His story is a complicated blend of mythology, politics, nationalism, and athleticism. At once an innovator and a traditionalist, many of the postures we associate with yoga today were cooked up in the gymkhana kitchen at the Jaganmohan Palace in Mysore. Learning about yoga today without knowing about Krishnamacharya would be like learning about cars without talking about Henry Ford.

From the lesser-known nooks and crannies of yoga history all the way to the classics, The Yoga History Podcast covers it all, and in this episode we explore the history of the Bhagavad Gita. Often referred to as the Yoga Shastra, the Gita is perhaps the book most often associated with yoga. An excerpt from the epic Mahabharata, the Bhagavad Gita is a dialogue between a hesitant hero and a mysterious senator named Krishna, who we later find out is an incarnation of the god Vishnu. The Gita is a timeless and archetypical piece of literature that you will find is a pleasure to study.

As much as you have to love the classics, many treasures await those who search for the lesser-known stories from yoga’s history. There are so many amazing people and moments that just didn't seem to make front page news. Shri Yogendra is definitely one of those hidden gems.

If you have been doing yoga for a long time, you might start to take some things for granted. An outsider, though, would no doubt find it odd that yogis like to go upside down so much. What’s with all the headstands? In this episode we take a look at when and why this whole upside-down thing began. At this point in the season, you probably won’t be surprised to discover there is more than one reason! This episode delves into mythology, ritual, sacrifice, asceticism, biomechanics, and hydraulics. Yes, that’s right: hydraulics.

The season finale has to be a big deal. It’s not like every episode hasn’t been important, but in the season finale we look at the person credited with bringing yoga to North America. Swami Vivekananda is the first Indian yoga guru to popularize yoga in America. His 1893 speech at the Parliament of World Religions, as well as his subsequent books intended for a Western audience, went on to become hugely influential in shaping yoga as we know it today. Let’s talk about why.

What if I told you that NBA All-Star Dennis Rodman was involved in a jewel heist at a California hot yoga studio? You would want to know more about that, wouldn’t you? This story is one part "Mission Impossible," one part "Tiger King," and one part "The Last Dance." Think that sounds pretty wild? You are correct.

A tragic loss of a beloved local yoga teacher is pretty heavy content. But yoga is not all love and light. This is a dark story about love, jealously, teacher-student relationships, murder, forensic science and it all happened around a little yoga studio in Tucson, Arizona.