The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America

In The Subtle Body, Stefanie Syman tells the surprising story of yoga€™s transformation from a centuries-old spiritual discipline to a multibillion-dollar American industry. Yoga€™s history in America is longer and richer than even its most devoted practitioners realize. It was present in Emerson€™s New England, and by the turn of the twentieth century it was fashionable among the leisure class. And yet when Americans first learned about yoga, what they learned was that it was a dangerous, alien practice that would corrupt body and soul. A century later, you can find yoga in gyms, malls, and even hospitals, and the arrival of a yoga studio in a neighborhood is a signal of cosmopolitanism. How did it happen? It did so, Stefanie Syman explains, through a succession of charismatic yoga teachers, who risked charges of charlatanism as they promoted yoga in America, and thro