Is yoga religion

Is Yoga Religion?

“Is Yoga Religion?” An Aeon magazine piece on the controversies over yoga in schools.

“What if modern postural yoga is neither religious nor secular, but something in between, or something beyond, something whose evident appeal partly lies in that very liminality?” As Stefanie Syman shows in The Subtle Body (2010), her history of yoga in the US, American asana practice has been oscillating for more than a century between ashram and gym, sometimes clothed in exotic veils and other times in low-cut spandex. It is this very oscillation — a flux incarnated for many practitioners every time they hit the mat — that ‘is’ yoga.