Yogi Calisthenics 127
However, in the thirty years since Vivekananda’s US tour, the American public
had been exposed to a far greater variety of phenomena that qualified as yoga.
Even Vivekananda’s successors, like Swami Abhedananda, did not fully share
his dismissal of superpowers and physical practice. In the same year that our
Yogananda would arrive on American shores, a different Swami Yogananda was
making waves in the New York medical community. Manibhai Haribhai Desai—
who went by the title of Swami Yogananda during his brief visit to the United
States between 1919 and 1923 and later became widely known in his native India
as Shri Yogendra— performed not only āsanas but also superhuman feats such as
inflating alternating lungs, altering the temperature of his extremities at will, and
manipulating the electrical lights in the room and stopping his watch by means
of electromagnetic energies emanating from his body.^5 Thus, immersion in the
American scene demanded that our Yogananda acclimate to the spiritual climate
of his market and it must have become quickly obvious to the newly arrived
Swami that his audience was after more than just abstruse, if exotic, philosophy.
After his initial address in Boston, Yogananda continued to take any oppor-
tunity he could for speaking engagements in the Northeast. The end of 1920
found him, perhaps not surprisingly, a guest of Pierre Bernard, the infamous
“Omnipotent Oom,” who was by then a well- respected citizen and estate holder
in Nyack, New York. Although the rumors of tantric rituals and late- night orgies
had more or less died down, Bernard’s Clarkstown Country Club was a regular
stop for any Indian scholar or spiritual aspirant who came through the area. As
Llwellyn Smith Jackson, a long- time disciple of Bernard better known as Cheerie,
recalled, Yogananda
stood out dramatically in his yellow robe, his very large brown eyes with
long black lashes, his long raven- colored curls resting on his shoulders... .
He lectured on yoga, ending the talk with a song, accompanied with an
Indian instrument which he played. The song, “Oh, God, Beautiful” ...
he sang over and over, rolling his lustrous eyes lovingly and generously in
the direction of the pretty girls watching him.^6On the subject of Yogananda’s association with the man whom Robert Love,
Bernard’s biographer, identifies as the father of American haṭha yoga, Love goes
so far as to claim that “Bernard and Yogananda respectfully parted ways after
this visit for good reason: the Indian swami was uninterested in hatha yoga—
disdained it, actually— and never taught it; Bernard placed hatha yoga at the
center of a rapidly growing enterprise that was becoming more varied by the
d a y.”^7 While Love’s characterization might be apt in the case of Vivekananda,
Yogananda, as this chapter will duly show, held no marked disdain for haṭha