Women's Body, Lineage, and Yoga: Geeta Iyengar's Yoga (R)evolution

Presenter:

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Abstract

Recent studies indicate that women form the majority of yoga practitioners in recent years. However, until the popularization of yoga in the early twentieth century in India women were discouraged and excluded from it. In the contemporary Iyengar yoga tradition, not only that women were included from its start, but it was shaped and evolved in order to accommodate women’s needs. This was done since the Iyengar yoga tradition viewed classical yoga tradition’s practices as male-centered, and therefore as unfitting for women. The inadequacy of the classical practices became explicitly visible when the Iyengar yoga tradition addressed women’s changing physiology, such as menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause. The focus of the lecture is the female agents who shaped, implemented, and transmitted women-oriented yoga practices in the Iyengar tradition. It will draw on the finding of my Ph.D. research, of the Iyengar yoga tradition’s revolutionary endeavor to intentionally modify classical yoga tradition’s practices and key concepts in order to include women and meet their needs, during the period 1935-2018. The prevalence of women-oriented Iyengar yoga practices is evident. These unique modifications for women are presented in the Iyengar yoga teacher-training courses and form part of the curriculum and teacher assessments. Such modified practices can be found in all Iyengar yoga classes with female participants. Moreover, there are special instructions for women in all the Iyengar literature, and ten designated books of modified yoga practices for women. The development of these altered yoga practices is chiefly accredited to the founder of the tradition,