Yoga made its first inroads into American consciousness in Concord, MA in 1841 through a group of philosophers known as the Transcendentalists. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott, to name the chief ones, started reading and studying the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and a few other yogic texts through the English translations by W.B. Yates and others.
The American philosophers were fascinated and profoundly influenced by the lofty teachings of the Indian Upanishads, as evidenced by their later manifestos on religious life, civil disobedience, and education. For the ancient yogis, as for the Transcendentalists, the central reality is that of the soul force which must be respected and allowed to manifest in harmony with the body and mind.
Henry David Thoreau, who led a life of seclusion and renunciation in the woods for two years, studied the Bhagavad Gita every day during that period. Although no asanas, mantras, or breathing techniques had been introduced to the West yet, he intuitively perceived the awesome power of yoga and practiced it diligently. In 1849, he wrote to a friend, “Depend on it that, rude and careless as I am, I would practice the yoga faithfully. To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogi.”
The influence of the Transcendentalists on the American psyche was enormous, and continues to reverberate to this day.
It was only a matter of time before a flesh-and-blood yogi master would set foot on American soil to give life and vibrancy to the yogic teachings. In September 1893 was held the first World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, IL. Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902), a young dynamic monk from India, was one of the closing speakers. The force of his conviction and the spiritual vastness of the Eternal Tradition took America, and later Europe, by storm. Wherever he went, the “Tornado Swami” as the press called him, firmly established the teachings of Vedanta in the West, revealed the unique spiritual accomplishments of his beloved master Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, and made yoga a household word.
At the same World Parliament of Religions, Soyen Shako Roshi, the first Zen master ever to visit America, planted the first seeds of Buddhism in the West.
In 1902 a young yogic monk landed in San Francisco to deliver an electrifying series of lectures. Swami Rama Tirtha (1873-1906), a realized yogi and master of Vedanta, was also a renowned professor of mathematics who knew how to perfectly blend the language of science and spirit. His seminal work, In Woods of God-Realization, contains the quintessence of yogic teachings and Vedantic philosophy, as well as sublime mystical poetry and wisdom tales.
In October 1920, the young Swami Yogananda Giri (1893-1952) left India to address the International Congress of Religious Liberals in Boston, Massachusetts. His speech on “The Science of Religion” was so well received and widely reprinted, that he spent the rest of his life in America, thus becoming the first Indian spiritual teacher to reside permanently in the West. His destiny and mission had been forecasted by the great Babaji Maharaj who had said to his disciple Lahiri Mahasaya in 1894, “Some years hence I shall send you a disciple whom you can train for yoga dissemination to the West. The vibrations there of many spiritually seeking souls come flood-like to me. I perceive potential saints in America and Europe, waiting to be awakened.” That disciple was Paramahansa Yogananda who went on to write the classic Autobiography of a Yogi that presented the ancient teachings of Kriya Yoga (known as “the mother of all yogas” in India) in scientific terms, which appealed enormously to the Cartesian Western consciousness. At the instance of Babaji Maharaj, Paramahamsa Hariharananda (1907-2003), a co-disciple of Paramahamsa Yogananda, came to the West in 1974, as Babaji felt that Western consciousness had now sufficiently evolved to receive the full teachings of Kriya Yoga.
The modern hatha yoga movement (misleadingly known simply as “yoga”) started in America with Hollywood, perhaps not surprisingly, when Russian-born Indra Devi, called “the first lady of yoga”, opened a yoga studio in Hollywood in 1947. Her classes attracted many movie stars, and she trained hundreds of yoga teachers. California, land of experimentation, was to become the great incubator of yoga for the West. To this day, most of the great yoga teachers from India have been coming there.
But it was not until the sixties that hatha yoga attracted the masses. When the Beatles travelled to Rishikesh, the holy city of the Himalayas, in the mid-sixties, they met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who taught them yoga and Transcendental Meditation. The Beatlemania and celebrity worship did the rest. A continuous flow of yoga teachers from India has been coming to Europe, Australia and the Americas ever since |
