om spirit om spirit
Swami Satchidananda’s Integral Yoga
Insititute and Yogi Bhajan’s Kundalini Yoga
are, of course, thriving today.
At the same time as the spiritual
dimension of yoga was being rediscovered
and re-imagined, helped along by a new
influx of gurus, the practice was taking
another step towards mass popularity,
especially among women.
Richard Hittleman’s Yoga for Health
arrived on Los Angeles television in 1961.
Hittleman, as Stefanie Syman writes in The
Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America,
‘had already devoted much of his life to
yoga...A fun-loving, cigar-smoking guy who
became deeply committed to Zen as well,
Hittleman would “play it straight” when he
was teaching...although he believed “pure
bliss consciousness” was the whole point
of practicing.’
Although Hittleman took the divine
dimension of yoga seriously, he’d learned
that the way to succeed as a teacher was
to focus on the exercise, sports and health
aspect. On TV this worked. Hittleman was
soon receiving 600 letters on average a
week from viewers.
Hittleman dressed in ballet slippers, tight-
fitting trousers and a purple shirt and was a
compelling, charismatic figure. If you watch
the clip of Elvis singing Yoga Is As Yoga Does
on YouTube, you’ll see that he’s dressed in
pretty much the same way as Hittleman.
Coincidence or an attempt at smart
marketing to Elvis’s housewife audience, the
only people prepared to stick with him as he
made movie turkey after turkey?
education system was trying to find a way
to assess the quality of teachers to meet
the growing demand for yoga. Light on
Yoga helped persuade the Inner London
Educational Authority (ILEA) to include
classes on yoga among their offering, which
ranged from sewing to swimming. It also led
to the ILEA agreeing, in 1969, that Iyengar-
trained teachers would be authorised to
teach its classes.
Because Iyengar lived in Pune and only
came to the UK once a year, he couldn’t
train teachers himself although he could
assess them after they were trained. Out
of necessity, a system of distance learning
developed that was to lead to the worldwide
growth of Iyengar yoga and provide a model
for the teaching of other forms of yoga that
exists today.
But Iyengar’s system would be criticised
for only teaching physical postures. Iyengar
justified this by saying ‘I took the active side
of meditation by making students totally
absorbed in the poses’.
Iyengar yoga would also come gently
under fire for, as Jenny Beeken, author,
teacher and co-founder of the UK’s Inner
Yoga Trust, puts it, making ‘yoga too rigid’.
It was this emphasis on the physical side
of yoga that would dominate throughout
the 1980s.Interlude: the first yoga mat
in the UK
When I interviewed Jenny Beeken, I was
curious to find out what yoga was actually
like in the 1970s. For instance, I did my
first yoga class in 1979 and I seem to
remember we practiced on green, slightly
puffy gym mats. I wondered when the first
yoga mats appeared.
‘They were created by an advanced
Iyengar teacher named Angela Farmer in
the 1970s,’ Beeken told me. She invented
the sticky mat. I think she had them made in
Germany. They weren’t an Indian thing at all.
Angela was one of the main teachers at the
time. She used to travel all over.’
So now you know.Mainstream yoga in the 1980s
At the beginning of the 1980s, yoga – still
not that well-established in the West – was
struggling commercially.
As Stefanie Syman writes ‘Aerobics
emphasised power and strength, as
women climbed career ladders and started
competing more directly with men in much
greater numbers...Yoga was gentle, relaxing,
and safe, qualities not likely to help you
break through the glass ceiling.’
This was also the age of the video“I did my first yoga class in 1979 and I seem to
remember we practiced on green, slightly puffy gym
mats. I wondered when the first yoga mats appeared.”Iyengar and the beginnings of
modern yoga education
The early 1960s also saw the beginning of
the rise and rise of B.K.S. Iyengar. Iyengar
was a student of Krishnamacharaya, the
creator of a system that blended traditional
Hatha asanas with postures from Western
gymnastics and calisthenics to create
something new.
After studying with Krishnmacharaya for
what might have been as little as three days,
Iyengar began teaching yoga for a living. He
claimed to have mainly taught himself by
observing his asana practice closely.
In 1937, Iyengar went to the Indian city of
Pune initially to train college students on a
six-month contract. He stayed on in the city
and built up a clientele, partly using yoga to
treat people with medical conditions.
Iyengar’s big break came in 1952 when he
was invited to give a demonstration of yoga
to the American violinist Yehudi Menuhin
who was touring India. From 1954 onwards,
Menuhin brought Iyengar to Europe and
the US to teach him and his friends yoga.
Beginning in 1960, Iyengar spent at least a
month in London every year up until 1974,
courtesy of Menuhin.
In 1962, publishing agent Gerald Yorke was
given the manuscript of what Dr Suzanne
Newcombe describes as ‘a comprehensive
instructional guide to yogasana’. This was
published as Light on Yoga, with a foreword
by Menuhin, in 1966. The book would go on
to influence the teaching of today’s most
popular styles of yoga.
As early as 1960, the British adult