om spirit
I
t’s 1967 and Elvis is singing Yoga Is
As Yoga Does in a movie called Easy
Come, Easy Go. The song has been
written for him on the instructions of
his carnival hustler turned manager
Colonel Tom Parker as a calculated insult. It’s
mocking Elvis’s very real devotion to Swami
Yogananda and Kriya yoga, which frightened
the life out of Colonel Tom and the Memphis
Mafia who surrounded Elvis and saw him as
their meal ticket.
Yoga Is as Yoga Does is a terrible song
from an awful movie. But it’s significant for
what it says about the state of yoga in the
USA and the rest of the Western world at
that time.Sergeant Pepper’s, psychedelic
yoga and TV
In the same year as Elvis was singing, ‘You
tell me how I can take this yoga seriously?’Part three: The swinging sixties, the seventies...and into the eighties.
By David Holzer
the Beatles Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts
Club Band appeared and changed rock and
roll music overnight. Among the people
pictured on the album’s cover was Swami
Yogananda, looking every bit the hippy rock
and roller with his long hair and soulful gaze.
Given their status as international avatars
of hip, it wasn’t surprising that the Beatles
would have been turned on to the Indian
philosophical systems in which it was
generally understood yoga was rooted.
They had strong links to the countercultural
scenes in London, New York, Los Angeles
and San Francisco where yoga was a hip
part of the lifestyle.
In these underground circles, meditating,
pro-yoga characters like beat poet Allen
Ginsberg and the writer Aldous Huxley were
hooking up with LSD advocate Timothy Leary
and his acid disciples. Leary and co saw
yoga as a valuable tool in voyages of self-discovery, especially fuelled by psychedelics.
John Lennon had picked up a copy of
Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual
Based On The Tibetan Book Of The Dead i n- This would inspire the song Tomorrow
Never Knows and the line ‘When in doubt,
relax, turn off your mind, float downstream’
on the Revolver album.
The Beatles association with gurus,
particularly Mahareshi Maharesh Yogi –
founder of Transcendental Meditation –
boosted interest in Eastern philosophy in the
West enormously. It also helped make the
practice of yoga part of the hippy way of life.
From 1965, when a 1924 US law restricting
immigration from India, was removed,
gurus began checking out America. Among
them were Swami Satchidananda and Yogi
Bhajan. These two gurus and their teaching
received extremely valuable exposure at the
legendary Woodstock festival in 1969.