![]() They introduce her to Aldous Huxley, who is a famous writer who has kind of a longtime interest in Eastern spirituality. She has some connections from her Shanghai days, people who are now in California who introduce her to various figures in Hollywood. You can see a lot of tabloid news stories about lecherous yogis luring women away from their marriages and families, but there hadn't really been very many yoga teachers in part because the Alien Exclusion Act kept South Asian immigrants from coming to the United States. There was a brief yoga panic in the United States in the 1920s. There had been a couple of yoga teachers here and there in the United States. After the war, she sails for Hollywood and she opens up one of the first yoga studios. in 1947įirst she goes to Shanghai and she has a yoga studio in a villa that had been owned by Madame Chiang Kai-shek, and she's there during the Japanese occupation. and saw that yoga had a lot to offer people outside of his own purview and he charged her with teaching a lot of what he had taught her. And after he had taught her many of his secrets, he kind of came around. And when he saw how dedicated she was, he sort of relented and eventually developed enormous affection for her. The maharajah basically said, "Krishnamacharya, you have no choice, you have to teach her." He finally gave in, he grudgingly started giving her lessons. She went over his head, she went to the maharajah. ![]() Probably the most supernatural thing about her was her astonishing charisma. She had this lifelong talent for cultivating people, for getting people to want to do her favors. He said, "I don't teach women and I don't teach Westerners." He wanted her to go away and she basically went over his head. At first he wanted nothing to do with her. She was a woman in her 30s by the time she came to. So he put in things that if you do yoga now are really familiar to you - the jump backs and the chaturanga, which is the sort of half-pushups and these very fast, flowing movements that we call vinyasa - he created a lot of those things. Krishnamacharya - because a lot of his students were young, royal boys - created a system that would sort of capture the animal energy of an 8- or 9- or 10-year-old boy. And so he sponsored Krishnamacharya to run a yoga school in the palace. Krishnamacharya was the yogi-in-residence at the Mysore Palace, and the Maharajah of Mysore was this very progressive nationalist figure who really wanted to unite the best of the East and the best of the West. It kindles a fascination with India that will carry her throughout almost a century, but really it's Indian wisdom as refracted through a sort of American self-help writer, and I think that exemplifies, again, the sort of mashup that we see both in her life and her thinking, but also in yoga as it has come to us today. She finds this book, she thinks that it's a sort of dispatch from this otherworldly land. This was the sort of book you would find in the library of a bohemian Russian aristocrat. Indra Devi discovers this book in the library of a Russian aristocrat. On the book 14 Lessons in Yogi Philosophy and Oriental Occ ultism, by American William Walter Atkinson, which sparked Indra Devi's interest in yoga Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Goddess Pose Subtitle The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West Author Michelle Goldberg
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