Beyond Posture, Beyond Therapy

EMBODYING TRANSNATIONAL YOGA: EATING, SINGING, AND BREATHING IN TRANSFORMATION. By Christopher Jain Miller. London: Routledge, 2024. Pp. 184. Paperback $43.99. Modern yoga consists of more than physical postures (āsana) and meditation, yet these aspects of modern yoga traditions have received near-exclusive attention from scholars. Christopher Jain Miller's Embodying Transnational Yoga: Eating, Singing, and Breathing in Transformation (2023) aptly fills this gap in a multi-sited ethnography of three understudied somatic elements of transnational yoga: diet, music, and breathing techniques. As he notes, in yoga communities, “three of the primary practical imperatives one often encounters are the necessity to modify one's eating and drinking habits, to re-learn how to breathe, and to engage in various forms of musical or sacred sound practices” (10). Miller gives us a close, textured look at three considerably different sites of yogic practice: Gurani Anjali's Yoga Anand Ashram in Long Island, New York; Polestar Gardens on the Big Island of Hawaii (a yoga community following the teachings of Paramahamsa Yogananda), and Kaivalyadhama Yoga Institute in Lonavala, Maharashtra in India. By studying yoga communities in New York and Hawaii, Miller is able to show how yoga's influence has traveled beyond the Indian Ocean region to root itself even in the Atlantic and Pacific regions. Research for the book includes information and insights acquired through formal and informal interviews and analysis of recorded lectures, collected pamphlets, books, and other publications within each yoga community. Still, Miller also actively participated in and observed the dietary, musical, and breathing practices that he encountered. These mixed methods allow him to successfully marry insider and outsider approaches and understandings. He is transparent in presenting his position as both a critical scholar and a dedicated practitioner of yoga (indeed, noting that he was a practitioner first, then later became an academic). Permeating this book is his perspective that the scholarly study of yoga should be conducted in a way that is simultaneously critical and sympathetic. Miller introduces the key term “engaged alchemy” to refer to the ways in which transnational disseminators of yoga adapt dietary practices, music, and breathing techniques within specific contexts to produce context-specific forms of transformative yoga practice. In his words, the idea is that “culturally generated frictions between traveling yoga systems and the novel social contexts they encounter produce ... engaged alchemies” (153). One of the biggest strengths of the book is the way in which Miller shows how the novel cultural constraints that yoga disseminators face can actually become generative forces for contemporary yoga. The reader sees how dietary, musical, and breathing practices get “transformed in their encounters with [new] cultural influences” while, at the same time, these practices “inculcate their students' bodies in their soteriological yoga systems” and thus “reshape the broader cultural spaces in which they operate” (1). In Chapter One, Miller focuses on Gurani Anjali's Yoga Anand Ashram in Long Island, New York, and its food and dietary practices. The people who came to make up this yoga community in the 1960s–1970s were largely from a particular demographic that wanted “to authenticate their individual liberties” and “to enact countercultural dissent” and who longed for simplicity and ecological wholeness. They were part of, or sympathetic to, the food-based social resistance movements popular in the American counterculture that had arisen out of environmental, social, and health food justice concerns of the time. Miller's core argument in this chapter is that Gurani Anjali strategically harnessed these countercultural sentiments and concerns so as to bring her students' bodies into her own soteriological model of yoga. In other words, students may have adopted a vegetarian diet and practices of fasting initially because of countercultural concerns, but, as Miller puts it, “these foodways were one of the key means by which [Anjali] committed her American students to her own yogic cultural logic grounded primarily in vegetarian diet, fasting, and selfless service in the ashram's restaurant and other establishments” (50). These dietary practices served as an embodied, practical bridge to the yogic ethical practices and values of yama and niyama, such as and especially ahiṃsā (non-harming of living things), and the yogic pursuit of a spiritually purer, higher Self. Miller remarks that, in fact, “Anjali was not strictly vegetarian and was not preoccupied with the countercultural health food movement as many of her students were” (67). She seems to have seen them as a skillful means, well suited to her audience, to engage students in yogic spiritual transformation. There has undoubtedly been a “therapeutic turn” in which the goal of many modern forms of yoga (including their related dietary practices) is health and wellness, but Miller stresses that we must not conceive an artificial binary between therapeutic-modern and soteriological-premodern. Chapter One on Gurani Anjali's Yoga Anand Ashram demonstrates how modern forms of yoga can be, and often are, oriented toward health-wellness and soteriological concerns at one and the same time. In this respect, Embodying Transnational Yoga, like Andrea Jain's Selling Yoga (2016), partly addresses the issue of critique slipping into full cynicism. Scholars today are well practiced in showing how modern yoga and other contemporary spiritual practices are thoroughly embedded within systemic practices, and discourses of consumerism, neoliberalism, identity politics, class distinction, individualism, etc., but can they nevertheless still be oriented toward spiritual transformation? Can they still do real “authentic” spiritual work? Miller answers with a resounding “Yes; and let me show you how.” In Chapter Two, Miller shifts his focus to the yoga community of Polestar Gardens on the Big Island of Hawaii in order to study embodied yogic practices of sacred sound and music. A principal draw of the Polestar community is its kirtan music. Devotional music is part of the three-times-a-day daily meditation sessions; there is a weekly large evening public kirtan, and each year, they host an annual ten-day Sacred Music Festival. The community follows the teachings of Paramahamsa Yogananda, who felt that “sacred audible music in the form of kirtan initiates meditation on the internal, unstruck sound wherein one subsequently goes inward into meditation practice” and seeks oneness with this universal divine vibration (87). Participating in sacred music of any kind, Yogananda thought, could serve as a bridge toward having this spiritual experience, and this openness to different varieties of music as valid spiritual pathways allowed for the seamless integration of the ukulele into the musical practices at Polestar Gardens. As Miller argues, Yogananda creatively used Anglicized, Protestant forms of music and appealed to twentieth-century American musical tastes “to skillfully deliver his universal sonic theological message ... so that [American students] would become more willing to be initiated into his esoteric and much more expansive kriya-yoga practice” (85). Throughout the chapter, he discusses the ways in which the Hawaiian context transformed the sacred music at Polestar Gardens, while also arguing that the yogic dimensions—the spiritual purposes—of this music remained “altogether intact at their theoretical core” (83). A tension emerges here in Miller's argument. While he stresses that Yogananda's yogic intention and theory come through clearly even in the distinctive, recontextualized musical practices of Polestar Garden, he also states that “not all who practiced kirtan in the community ... understood or adhered to Yogananda's theology of internal sound” (104), nor did all community members “necessarily [understand] the ukulele, the harmonium, and kirtan practice as conveying such a clear theological message or as primarily useful for meditation or even a spiritual setting” (108). It is not clear how we are to resolve this apparent tension, and Miller unfortunately offers little concrete ethnographic data on this point. If the spiritual meaning and purpose of sacred music for the community members of Polestar Gardens remains somewhat ambiguous, the chapter makes clear the psychosocial benefits of this music, with an engaging and insightful discussion of how kirtan plays a key role “in aiding community members and participants in the regulation of their emotional challenges that naturally arise when living and working in such close quarters on an ongoing basis” (106). While the first two chapters of Miller's book are largely about understudied aspects of transnational yoga practice and how yogic (soteriological) intentions shine through even in these transformed and adapted (dietary and musical) practices, the tone and message shift in the third chapter, the most critical and the most provocative of the book. Chapter Three of Embodying Transnational Yoga fills a significant gap in the field of modern yoga studies in offering perhaps the first critical ethnographic study of prāṇāyāma (breath-control; yogic breathing techniques) in practice. Miller's research site is Kaivalyadham Yoga Institute in Lonavala, a small but busy hill station in the Western Ghats of Maharashtra, two hours from Mumbai on the massive Mumbai-Pune Expressway. In the context of India's consistently high levels of toxic urban air and the many negative health outcomes arising from it, Kaivalyadham advertises and promotes the practice of prāṇāyāma as a cure-all for all potential ailments that might afflict its visitors. As Miller explains, “Kaivalyadham prioritizes and champions a closed, self-purifying yoga body that is said to be capable of simultaneously purifying itself of environmental toxins that have entered the body, fortifying itself against disease, and experiencing liberation using, among other practices, the transformative practice of prāṇāyāma” (145, n. 2). At the heart of this chapter is a comparison of this emic view of a closed, “self-purifying hatha-yoga body” with the etic perspective of an “environmentally and socially entangled yoga body,” two models which Miller shows sit “irreconcilably—and perhaps precariously—alongside” one another (119). He highlights “the apparent irony ... of treating asthma and other air-pollution related diseases by ‘rebuilding intake’ of the very air that caused these conditions in the first place” (133). In a particularly fascinating section, Miller gives a firsthand account of practicing prāṇāyāma and yoga in a class as the fumes from burning trash, car exhaust from the nearby highway, and cigarette smoke from smokers outside seeped in through the open windows and into his lungs, while also admitting how he always felt extremely relaxed and rejuvenated after these yogic practices despite the ever-present air pollution. According to Miller, those who visit Kaivalyadham to undertake “self-purifying prāṇāyāma exercises when there is no chance for self-purification” (135) exemplify the individualized, neoliberal mindset and culture of modern urban India today, wherein the burden of responsibility for healing is placed squarely on the individual, leaving the political and economic systems that produce the toxic air around them intact and unchallenged. Indeed, at Kaivalyadham, Miller observed that “the external systemic sources of these ‘accumulated toxins’ and patients' mental instability are never discussed in any significant way” (135). More interview data from visitors regarding the institute's disacknowledgment of these structural realities would have added texture to this discussion, which is generally lacking in conveying the participants' own feelings about and understanding of the remarkable paradox of attempting to purify the body (of toxins and stress) through yogic practices that necessitate breathing in those very toxins. The yogic breathwork taught and practiced at Kaivalyadham offers more than just a case study in neoliberal biopolitical individualism, Miller argues. Drawing on Achille Mbembe's Necropolitics (2019), he asserts that Kaivalyadham's discourse on prāṇāyāma encourages “a distinctly necropolitical individualism,” in which we see the “subjugation of life to the power of death.” Miller notes how a number of scholars have discussed yoga's intersections with neoliberal ideology and biopolitics, but urges that “we need to begin to consider how yoga might also promote the slow loss (rather than the maintenance) of life” and to ask whether necropolitics might be a better frame than neoliberalism for understanding certain forms and contexts of yoga (144–45). This is certainly an intriguing suggestion, potentially opening up exciting new interpretive possibilities; however, Miller does not elaborate upon what the theoretical frame of necropolitics might allow us to see or provide any specific detail regarding how it might add to our understanding of modern yoga. Embodying Transnational Yoga, especially in its first two chapters, succeeds in its goal of having readers “more fully appreciate the creativity and ingenuity” of transnational modern yoga innovators who “embedded their yoga systems into novel worlds of social experience” and in ways that, however altered, still held the potential to “implicate practitioners into an experience of embodied transformation” (157). In the third chapter, Miller's more critical posture opens up important questions about the neoliberal and necropolitical contexts and effects of modern yoga practice. In sum, this book's study of largely unexplored embodied aspects of transnational yoga practice (eating, singing, and breathing) is a valuable contribution to the field that shows how even as modern forms of yoga change within new cultural locales, and even as they cater to trends, expectations, and motivations of specific target audiences, they nonetheless retain their distinctness as “yoga” and continue to hold the potential for spiritual transformation. Miller's argument raises the following question: Is yoga's transformative spiritual potential inherent in its embodied practice(s), or must it be accompanied by a certain explicit theoretical-conceptual framework and allied intention? While the book sacrifices depth and ethnographic detail (particularly the voices of yoga practitioners at each site) in favor of breadth, in doing so, it offers readers an insightful exploration of three different embodied dimensions of modern yoga practice in three very different cultural and geographic settings

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