xii Prefacexii
That summer I finally learned to do a push- up, decided to abandon my plan
to pursue a PhD in Victorian literature, found out about the Law of Attraction,
and made my first— and to this day only— vision board. I also stood on the
beach every morning, fingernails loaded with sand from digging my way through
seemingly endless sun salutations, and chanted into the crashing waves of the
Atlantic: Mahavatar Babaji ... Lahiri Mahasaya ... Swami Sri Yukteswar ...
Paramahansa Yogananda ... Bishnu Ghosh. This was our lineage. Our param-
para. Alongside B. K. S. Iyengar’s Light on Yoga and several works by Georg
Feuerstein, we were assigned The Autobiography of a Yogi. I never made it to the
end. Frankly, I thought it was kind of nutty. Plus, it seemed hardly more related to
doing lunges than did the philosophy of the Yoga Sūtras.
My teacher thought otherwise. Jimmy Barkan, it turned out, was not only a
student of Choudhury’s postural yoga but also a spiritual disciple of Paramahansa
Yogananda through the Self- Realization Fellowship. For Jimmy, these two iden-
tities were intimately connected, but only because of his own intuitive under-
standing on the practice. It would be a nearly a decade before I would have the
opportunity to untangle with him, in a lengthy phone call, what it meant that
the āsana practice he identified as being unique to Bishnu Ghosh’s lineage was
the very same one that Yogananda had taught to select American disciples. Or,
even more important, why the Self- Realization Fellowship had refused to allow
him to substitute the āsanas he had learned from Choudhury for their program’s
calisthenic Energization Exercises.
When I declared my desire to pursue a PhD in South Asian religions so that
I could study yoga, my advisor in the English department dutifully accepted my
decision but requested that I don’t bring him any crystals. I was again confused.
I had no idea what crystals had to do with yoga. Now I realize I was only in the
dark because the resident New Ager at my teacher training had by then moved
on from crystals to The Secret. The reason I was failing to recognize my yoga or its
surrounding culture in its Indian roots was because these roots told only half of
the story and perhaps not the most immediate one. Elizabeth De Michelis first
sparked this idea in my mind when she called modern yoga “the graft of a Western
branch onto the Indian tree of yoga.”^1 I’m now inclined to modify the metaphor.
Modern yoga is less a graft and more an inosculation— the place where two trees,
each with their own ancient root system, have entwined so intimately that they
have become one. It would take me another half a decade to figure this out.
Indeed, it was precisely when my relationship with yoga, both personally and
intellectually, seemed most tenuous that the pieces finally came together. At a total
loss for a dissertation topic, I sat down and finished Yogananda’s Autobiography.
Years before, I had tossed the book aside because I couldn’t make sense of it. The
fact is, Yogananda’s work remains so difficult to place precisely because it is not