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Visiting  Master Teacher - Eric Shaw Prasana Yoga styke / www.prasanayoga.com

Three Lectures on Yoga History

with Eric Shaw

MA Religious Studies, MA Education, teaches and lectures on yoga in India and America.  He is the author of the upcoming book, Yoga Unfolding: The History of Modern Yoga.

Ancient Yoga History to 1893

Tantrics, Hatha Yogis, Hindu Nationalists and Swami Vivekananda all contributed to the changing face of yoga in India.  Brahmanism reacted to Buddhism and a new urban culture in India around 600 b.c.e. and the yoga tradition was born.  Yoga’s Ancient History reveals how India’s religious genius made a science out of the approach to God.

How Yoga was Re-made in Modern India

The Father of modern India, Ram Mohan Roy was a creative force in society and religion and helped make new attitudes toward ritual and yoga.  He founded the Brahmo Samaj, a group that helped educate Swami Vivekenanda and Vivekananda squared yoga with science, as did other members of the Hatha Yoga Renaissance.  Yoga was used to make strong bodies in the struggle for national independence and became the export product of swamis and going west before and after 1947. 

How Yoga came to America and the West

Ram Mohan Roy was in dialog with liberal Christians in America and his organization, the Brahmo Samaj was inspired by American ideas about religion.  This dialog intensified after Vivekananda taught yoga in New York and elsewhere.  Americans used yoga for fitness, health and self-transformation.  Tantra influenced yoga’s early forms in the West and yoga’s strangeness was overcome by Americans who made it into a method for achieving individual aims in an affluent, capitalist economy.

4 September - 5 September: Saturday - Sunday

8:30  am - 10:30 am