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Introduction
These days everywhere you look you see yoga, from advertisements about yogurt
to interactive videogames. Over the past twenty-five years yoga has been transformed
from a sub-culture undercurrent to a staple of North American popular culture. Yoga has
become something of a big business of late, amid ever-growing claims of the benefits of
yoga from practitioners of all ages and like any product, yoga offers a variety of brands
each promoting various images and attracting different consumers. I became interested in
finding out what kinds of yoga people are practicing and why, and about their attitudes
toward and views on yoga. My aim in this thesis is to explore how different practitioners
relate to yoga and particularly to examine their sense of connection to yoga as a
traditional Indian religious practice.
As a yoga practitioner and teacher myself, I have had the good fortune to meet a
large variety of yoga practitioners with a wide range of views over the last many years.
While from my perspective, there were a number of religious elements reflected in the
milieu of the yoga class, most of the people I met did not feel that they were doing
anything particularly religious when taking a class. In 2005, a friend and fellow yoga
teacher invited me to join him for a class at the newly opened Moksha Yoga studio in
Montreal. My impressions of that class are what inspired me to undertake this study. The
room was hot, it had mirrors, and it was filled with near naked people sweating profusely.
At the very end of the class, after the teacher told us to lie down for final relaxation, she
uttered the Indian salutation “Namaste” and students responded likewise. Lying there in
relaxation my mind began to turn over the idea of “Indian-ness”. There was nothing
particularly Indian, Hindu or “traditional” about the class and yet the teacher found it
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necessary or significant to end with “namaste”, which evoked the class‟ response. Why?
This thesis aims to answer this question, and, more broadly, the question of how
practitioners of modern Western yoga relate to its “traditional” roots.
My primary research methods included both participant observation and
interviews. It was obvious to me that each of the various styles of yoga oriented itself
differently in relation to India and Hinduism. As this case study was to be conducted in
Montreal, I purposefully chose three distinct styles that one could find in most major
North American cities: Sattva Yoga Shala (Ashtanga-Vinyasa Yoga), Moksha Yoga
Montreal (hot yoga) and Centre de Yoga Iyengar de Montréal (Iyengar Yoga). In each of
these studios I attended numerous classes before introducing myself to any staff or
students. After some weeks of participant observation in the classes I sought out
participants for my interviews (see Appendix 1 for interview questions). The interviews
were all held in a public place, often the studio itself, and had an average duration of fifty
minutes. As I had been expecting a large difference between the opinions of students and
teachers, I interviewed three of each at each studio. I chose teachers whose class I had
attended and, if possible, also interviewed the studio‟s owner and/or manager. I selected
the students based on familiar faces; if I had seen a student a few times at the studio, I
would then approach them to introduce myself and ask for an interview. As such, the mix
of students was not directly determined by me. For example, the three Moksha students
did not turn out to represent the typical Moksha student. For the purpose of this thesis I
have given all the participants pseudonyms. These are coded pseudonyms based on which
style a participant practices and if they are a teacher or student; for example AT2 is the
second Ashtanga Yoga teacher and MS1 is the first Moksha Yoga student. I examined the
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data by themes according to responses to my interview questions and looked for patterns
in responses among teachers and students respectively.
In each studio participants ranged in ages and were of both sexes. Six out of the
eighteen participants were male. While outnumbered by women, the proportion of one-
third reflects the increasing number of male practitioners in recent years. The ages of the
participants ranged from twenty-six to sixty-three years old and they had a wide range of
experience in duration of practice or of teaching. As for myself, I am a Sivananda trained
yoga teacher who has been practicing yoga for the past seven years. If a participant asked
me, I would share a little about myself with respect to yoga. It was obvious that I
practiced yoga because I had met all participants in relation to a yoga class. I must
acknowledge one factor that may have had some influence on participants‟ responses that
is I am visibly South Indian. Participants largely enjoyed the interviews and for most it
was the first time they had reflected on any aspect of their practice.
Despite the many myths shrouding yoga‟s origins, there is no question as to the
importance of the seminal work the Yogasutras of Patanjali. Dating the text is
problematic, due in part to the debate concerning whether the Patanjali of the Yogasutras
is the indentical to the author of the Mahabhasya commentary on Panini‟s grammar. S.
Dasgupta proposes an origin date in the second century BCE (Dasgupta 1969, p.212),
while other reasoned estimates span even to the fourth century CE (Larson 2009, p.488).
Even if we could pinpoint the date of the Yogasutras, we must account for a long history
of development of thought leading up to Patanjali. This early development is “marked by
the fertile speculations expressed in” the Upanisads (Bryant 2009, p.xxi). One of the
central sections of the Mahabharata is the Bhagavad Gita, which expounds the
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