The Life Of The Woman Who Brought Yoga To The West
by Michelle Goldberg,
It’s become very easy to roll eyes at the women who flock to yoga studios every day with rolled-up mats under their arms, pricey workout clothes painted onto their bodies. You’ve seen this woman. She glides into the studio on a Tuesday at 10 a.m. like it’s her job. She’s not here for a spiritual awakening; she’s here for a perfect round ass. But as Michelle Goldberg reveals in her new book The Goddess Pose, yoga was a fat-trimming diversion for “respectable bourgeois ladies” before it became the domain of hippies and dreadlocked Caucasians. I always assumed that at some point around the time Alanis Morissette bestowed her thanks unto India, yoga was co-opted by the elite – another Starbucks where there once was an independent bookstore. But it turns out the practice just came full circle. Good news for the yogini who suspects she’s taking part in a global sham: yoga is a tradition corrupted, and in a way, it always has been.
The story of Indra Devi – born Eugenia Peterson in 1899, in Riga, which was then part of the Russian Empire – spans continents, decades, and wars. A fiercely independent woman, Devi never stopped moving until her death at the age of 103. In The Goddess Pose, she pops up, Zelig-like, in Russia during the Revolution; in the cabarets of Weimar Berlin; in Shanghai when it was occupied by the Japanese during the Second World War; in Saigon at the height of the Vietnam War; and in Panama in the late 1980s, where her influence on Colonel Roberto Diaz Herrera, a spiritual seeker himself, would change the course of Latin American history. She taught yoga to Greta Garbo and Gloria Swanson. She met John Lennon (and called him “Mr. Lemmon”).
Goldberg, an investigative journalist and senior contributing writer for the Nation, cobbled together Devi’s story from sources scattered in newspapers and archives around the world, only a portion of which were available in English. She expertly assembles the puzzle pieces of Devi’s life, pausing to provide context for the growing influence of spiritualism on modern American life. Yoga – specifically hatha yoga, the series of asanas, or postures, most commonly practised today – would play a key role in the postwar merging of “health and salvation,” Goldberg writes: “Yoga as it eventually came to be practised in the United States … let’s go deeper…