Yogi Calisthenics 129
and politically engaged pieces by Yogananda on subjects from racist yellow
journalism to the labor laws, explanations of the relationship between Yogoda
and Christian Science, and excerpts from Ralph Waldo Trine’s In Tune with the
Infinite (1897).
Above all, Yogananda learned his audience and he learned them well. His
ongoing efforts to remain relevant and pragmatic while simultaneously weaving in
a distinct spiritual agenda would come to bear fruit as his popularity soared. The
cornerstone of his appeal, along with his practical worldliness and raw charisma,
was a reimagined version of yogic practice that was distinctly physical in nature. In
a process that appears to have begun while he was still in India, Yogananda stripped
the ritual practice of Kriya Yoga to its barest functional bones and reframed it in a
context of therapeutic calisthenics coupled with a mind cure ideolog y. This body
of teachings, which he would call Yogoda,^11 bears no resemblance to and yet at the
same time is almost identical with modern forms of physical yogic practice. The
former point accounts for the reason that Yogananda is uniformly overlooked
in studies of the pedigree of postural yoga in America. His Yogoda Energization
Exercises look nothing like either traditional or modern yoga āsanas. However,
the functional role of his exercises is in total alignment with the use of āsanas
in modern postural yoga insomuch as they are geared at conditioning the body,
promoting health, and possibly preparing one for meditation.
There is a more specific point to be made here about the role and formation of
postural practice in the Indian and especially transnational yoga of the early twen-
tieth century. As Mark Singleton has thoroughly illustrated, āsana was during
this time a tenuous and non- delineated component of yoga practice. The modern
obsession with āsana practice emerged in part out of the complex interplay of
nationalistic “muscular Hinduism,” with its focus on man- building through phys-
ical culture, and the medicalizing efforts of figures like Swami Kuvalyananda.^12
On the other side of the world, the Western preoccupation with harmonial fitness
offered a continually friendly port of call for the process of cross- cultural exchange
that has lent modern postural yoga its current form. The bodily expressions we
now refer to uniformly as āsanas, thus endowing them with a “traditional” Indian
pedigree, hail from origins as diverse as medieval haṭha yogic manuals, regional
Indian wrestling exercises, British military calisthenics, and Swedish g ymnas-
tics. It would be reasonable to assume that in Yogananda’s time his Energization
Exercises might not have seemed any more or less like “yoga poses” than some
of the positions and movements to which that title is accorded today without a
second thought.
And yet Yogananda’s system is rarely if ever mentioned in overviews of
American yogic practice. The only immediately evident explanation is that
Yogananda himself never referred to his exercises as āsanas, nor has the SRF ever