Yoga Body Audiobook By Mark Singleton cover art

Yoga Body

The Origins of Modern Posture Practice

Preview

Try for $0.00
Access a growing selection of included Audible Originals, audiobooks, and podcasts.
You will get an email reminder before your trial ends.
Audible Plus auto-renews for $7.95/mo after 30 days. Upgrade or cancel anytime.

Yoga Body

By: Mark Singleton
Narrated by: Benjamin Crow
Try for $0.00

$7.95 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $17.19

Buy for $17.19

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel

About this listen

Yoga is so prevalent in the modern world - practiced by pop stars, taught in schools, and offered in yoga centers, health clubs, and even shopping malls - that we take its presence, and its meaning, for granted. But how did the current yoga boom happen? And is it really rooted in ancient Indian practices, as many of its adherents claim?

In this groundbreaking book, Mark Singleton calls into question many commonly held beliefs about the nature and origins of postural yoga (asana) and suggests a radically new way of understanding the meaning of yoga as it is practiced by millions of people across the world today.

Singleton shows that, contrary to popular belief, there is no evidence in the Indian tradition for the kind of health and fitness-oriented asana practice that dominates the global yoga scene of the 21st century. Singleton's surprising - and surely controversial - thesis is that yoga as it is popularly practiced today owes a greater debt to modern Indian nationalism and, even more surprisingly, to the spiritual aspirations of European bodybuilding and early 20th-century women's gymnastic movements of Europe and America, than it does to any ancient Indian yoga tradition. This discovery enables Singleton to explain, as no one has done before, how the most prevalent forms of postural yoga, like Ashtanga, Bikram, and "Hatha" yoga, came to be the hugely popular phenomena they are today.

Drawing on a wealth of rare documents from archives in India, the UK, and the USA, as well as interviews with the few remaining, now very elderly figures in the 1930s Mysore asana revival, Yoga Body turns the conventional wisdom about yoga on its head.

©2010 Oxford University Press, Inc. (P)2022 Upfront Books
20th Century Exercise & Fitness India South Asia Physical Exercise Yoga Hinduism
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

What listeners say about Yoga Body

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    7
  • 4 Stars
    2
  • 3 Stars
    2
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Performance
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    6
  • 4 Stars
    1
  • 3 Stars
    2
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    2
Story
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    8
  • 4 Stars
    1
  • 3 Stars
    2
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Much needed history lesson

Great overall historical look into a mostly mysterious spiritual practice. The transformation for century to century was quite fascinating and informative

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Compelling yet contrary scholarship

This brought great clarity to my perspective on the origins of yoga. As a generally skeptical, academic reader of religious histories, this work was interesting, relevant, and also modest in its assertions. Though there is some insinuation that the popular historical narrative was partly fabricated by a few key 20th century figures, the book is free of defamatory or condemnatory remarks. It also helped me square my knowledge of Patanjali and his western interpreters (esp. Crowley) with the modern, movement-based yoga I see all around me.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

I am pleasantly surprised

This book is one of the best books to bridge the gap of ancient yoga to modern yoga history.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Such a fun history

This is an eclectic and compelling history of yoga between the late 1800s to the early 1900s. It’s assigned in teacher training programs and university classrooms.

I found this book more concise than I expected, and much more fun. There were many new connections I hadn’t even considered. And there are so many interesting people in this history.

If you speed up the audio’s playback speed, the narration isn’t a problem.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

Unforgiving mispronounciation

Because this is written by a scholar to people that care for yoga and or are interested in going beyond common knowledge, I find it hard to accept the mistakes the narrator makes. Even the key words like asana, Patanjali and Krishnamacharya are mispronounced. If you can over that, it’s a wonderful book and very valuable missing piece in the history of yoga.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Infuriating narration

3.5 stars for the content which was interesting, there were just too many disparate topics linked together with little transition, and that made it hard to stay focused on the book, let alone actually recall the information.

The narration was very distracting, and made the already dry writing style even drier. It was bad enough to hear the narrator mispronounce names and yoga terminology, but the narrator also mispronounced English words. If I had to do it all over again, I’d pass.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful