It’s straightforward why John Friend exceptionally prescribes the book Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Yoga “for every genuine understudy of yoga.” Because, Mark Singleton’s theory is an all around looked into uncover of how present day hatha yoga, or “stance hone,” as he terms it, has changed inside and after the training left India.
However, the book is basically about how yoga changed in India itself over the most recent 150 years. How yoga’s primary, current advocates T. Krishnamacharya and his understudies, K. Patttabhi Jois and B. K. S. Iyengar-blended their homegrown hatha yoga hones with European tumbling.
This was what number of Indian yogis adapted to innovation: Rather than staying in the holes of the Himalayas, they moved to the city and grasped the approaching European social patterns. They particularly grasped its more “exclusive types of tumbling,” including the compelling Swedish strategies of Ling (1766-1839).
Singleton utilizes the word yoga as a homonym to clarify the fundamental objective of his proposition. That is, he accentuates that the word yoga has numerous implications, contingent upon who utilizes the term.
This accentuation is in itself a commendable undertaking for understudies of everything yoga; to appreciate and acknowledge that your yoga may not be an indistinguishable sort of yoga from my yoga. Essentially, that there are numerous ways of yoga.
In such manner, John Friend is completely right: this is by a wide margin the most extensive investigation of the way of life and history of the powerful yoga heredity that keeps running from T. Krishnamacharya’s muggy and hot royal residence studio in Mysore to Bikram’s falsely warmed studio in Hollywood.
Singleton’s investigation on “postural yoga” makes up the heft of the book. In any case, he additionally commits a few pages to layout the historical backdrop of “conventional” yoga, from Patanjali to the Shaiva Tantrics who, in view of substantially prior yoga customs, accumulated the hatha yoga convention in the medieval times and penned the well known yoga course books the Hatha Yoga Pradipika and the Geranda Samhita.
