Yoga Body, Yoga Spirit: Can We Have Both(Yoga Burn Challenge)

It's easy to understand why John Friend highly recommends the book Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Yoga "for all sincere students of yoga." Because, Mark Singleton's thesis is a well researched expose of how modern yoga, or "posture practice," as he terms it, has changed within and after the practice left India. This was how many Indian yogis coped with modernity: Rather than remaining in the caves of the Himalayas, they moved to the city and embraced the oncoming European cultural trends. They especially embraced its more "esoteric forms of gymnastics," including the influential Swedish techniques of Ling. Singleton uses the word yoga as a homonym to explain the main goal of his thesis. That is, he emphasizes that the word yoga has multiple meanings, depending on who uses the term. This emphasis is in itself a worthy enterprise for students of everything yoga; to comprehend and accept that your yoga may not be the same kind of yoga as my yoga. Simply, that there are many paths of yoga. Singleton's study on "postural yoga" makes up the bulk of the book. But he also devotes some pages to outline the history of "traditional" yoga, from Patanjali to the Shaiva Tantrics who, based on much earlier yoga traditions, compiled the hatha yoga tradition in the middle ages and penned the famous yoga textbooks the Hatha Yoga Pradipika and the Geranda Samhita. It is while doing these examinations that Singleton gets into water much hotter than a Bikram sweat. Thus I hesitate in giving Singleton a straight A for his otherwise excellent dissertation