Yogi Calisthenics 141
Yogananda clearly began developing some of these ideas while still in India
at the Ranchi school. However, this was not the message that he first intended
to bring to America, as evidenced by his inaugural address in Boston. Even if
Yogananda was aware of New Thought principles prior to his arrival in the
United States, it is evident that he was not anticipating the extent to which they
held sway over his new audience. The continued development of Yogoda signals
a realization on Yogananda’s part that practical yoga, as embodied in his own lin-
eage, held much greater potential than the neo- Vedāntin philosophy espoused
by Vivekananda. In this sense, Yogananda’s ritual training and initiation into a
formalized sādhana gave him a distinct edge over his predecessor and most of
his contemporaries. While it would not have been practical or, from a traditional
viewpoint, ethical to market Kriya Yoga to the mass public, its ritual complex
proved to be a rich resource for Yogananda’s metaphysical synthesis.
A Note on Āsana Practice
Although the SRF’s iteration of Kriya Yoga remains fundamentally haṭha yogic
in character, one cannot help but note the marked absence of āsanas from its rep-
ertoire. A close look at Yogananda’s biographical sources quickly illustrates that
he was no stranger to physical culture, yet he is nowhere explicitly described as
practicing or having any training in āsanas. This remains true until one turns to
the somewhat adjacent tradition of Yogananda’s youngest bother Bishnu Ghosh,
who would go on to become a major figure in the postural yoga landscape. It also
bears noting that Ghosh, whose yoga is precisely what we think of when referring
to postural practice today, traces his lineage directly through his older brother.
Although we have few details from Ghosh himself, his descendants and disciples
claim it was during his time at Yogananda’s Ranchi school that he learned the
eighty- four classical āsanas that would later be distilled into the popular Bikram
Yoga sequence and are still taught in full as Bikram Choudhury’s “advanced class.”
These āsanas apparently constituted an integral part of Yogananda’s Yogoda
method at the time.^33
This suggests that the substitution of āsanas with the considerably more
basic and Westerner- friendly Energization Exercises was simply another facet
of Yogananda’s process of adaptation. He does note in his Autobiography that
the boys at his Ranchi school, as the first to be subjected to the Yogoda regi-
men, were able to “sit in perfect poise in difficult body postures.”^34 Given that
no aspect of the Energization Exercises can be considered objectively “diffi-
cult,” it is possible that the system of physical development practiced at Ranchi
was in fact something more akin to Ghosh’s eighty- four posture sequence than