Yoga in Britain - Stretching Spirituality and Educating Yogis - Suzanne Newcombe
Prologue: Rethinking Yoga
Yoga in Britain - Stretching Spirituality and Educating Yogis - Suzanne Newcombe
Suzanne Newcombe [+]
Open University and Inform, King's College London
Suzanne Newcombe is a senior lecturer in religious studies at the Open University and honorary director of the charity Inform, based in theology and religious studies at King’s College London. From 2015 to 2020, she was part of the European Research Council– funded project “Ayuryog: Entangled Histories of Yoga, Ayurveda and Alchemy” in South Asia, which examined the histories of yoga, Ayurveda, and rasaśāstra (Indian alchemy and iatrochemistry) from the tenth century to the present, focusing on the disciplines’ health, rejuvenation, and longevity practices. She is the coeditor of The Routledge Handbook of Yoga and Meditation Studies (Routledge, 2021) and the author of Yoga in Britain: Stretching Spirituality and Educating Yogis (Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2019).
Description
The introduction considers the apparent ‘crisis of authenticity’ amongst contemporary yoga practitioners. It argues that in the course of the twentieth century, yoga was studied, popularized and practiced in ways that have fundamentally influenced the kaleidoscopic understandings of yoga present in the current environment. Those who investigated, interrogated and taught yoga traditions in the twentieth century were (in most cases) attempting to respectfully explore a tradition which might meet present needs. It argues that the popularization of yoga in the British context was highly influential in understanding the shape of contemporary global yoga.