#ch5 on bad experiences of middle class british women in hospitals during childbirth providing an opening for yoga interest

[get-back-homeward]

my late saturday night silly thought led me down a rabbit hole search this morning looking for answers.

i’ve seen yoga orgs credit the beatles for bringing yoga to the western world for years. it’s a comment that always sounds weird because the beatles rarely if ever refer to TM as “yoga”. i’ve been wondering about TM content for a while, and from what i’ve found, none of it seems to follow a specific type of yoga style you see today (hatha to ashtanga to vinyasa). from what i can tell it’s the maharishi’s own style of meditation by mantra with a sprinkling of eastern philosophy watered down for westerners. however, the goal of obtaining enlightenment fits in the yoga practice so generally it still fits under the yoga umbrella.

attributing the beatles to the introduction is also weird because yoga was being practiced in the western world way before they got into the maharishi’s transcendental meditation in 1967. but it’s undeniable that the band’s reach meant it exposed people to eastern philosophy that wouldn’t otherwise. i’ll admit i probably was more open to indian culture and my friend’s bollywood soundtracks as a kid because of indian instruments in beatles music. so even in early exposure, the meditative elements of yoga were never strange to me.

a 2011 dissertation’s timeline of modern yoga in britain includes TM and the beatles in this history, even though its got 19 pages before 1967. for example, the maharishi first lectured in london in 1960, hatha yoga was happening in the 1920s, and poses were incorporated into military training in ww2.

the full dissertation is here with chapter 6 on the beatles influence.

some relevant pages:

i wasn’t thinking about the sitar being their entry point for yoga poses, but it makes sense that TM wasn’t their first exposure to yoga.

looks like you can start playing sitar in a general crosslegged position (sukhasana), working up to siddhasana (perfect pose). but the professional sitar players like Ravi Shankar use gomukhasana (cow face), resting the gourd of the sitar on the bottom of your left foot.

the big trouble with sitar playing is how long you play in this position. playing is a meditative type of practice that can go hours. a sequence of asanas (like in sun salutations) are needed to prepare your legs, back, hips, etc. and work yourself up to longer and longer playing.

my guess is that this would be similar for meditation if you’re looking at working up to 8-hour long sessions, like george and john. padmasana (lotus pose) is the classic one that most meditation practice works up to, but it’s difficult and probably not one they were using for hours long meditation in india.

another post for another time, but the trouble i find with TM is how it takes this natural idea of having to work up to harder poses and longer meditation and turns it into some kind of scientology-like pyramid scheme with tiered levels of knowledge, a godly type figurehead, and pay-to-play business practices. this sets up for competitive and obsessive personalities to become fixated on reaching unrealistic, unobtainable, or totally fantastical goals (re: levitation). it’s where you see reports of mental health crises and cult-like behavior, and even though it may be more self-inflected by the communities that erupt around TM than the TM organizational structure itself, the main organization does actively cherrypick outcomes by suppressing bad ones and only marketing good ones. this isn’t exactly unique to TM, as anyone with exposure to yoga studios and their fanatics (see yoga instructor pipelines) may be familiar with. it’s just larger so its effects are more widespread, in part because of the beatles association. the maharishi died several years ago, but the organization continues to train people around the world with his method and invokes his name with religious type fervor.

does anyone else wonder whether the beatles did any actual yoga poses in india?