Exercise in personality
Change, adaptation and a dialogue between East and West have long been integral to yoga, something that comes through in Michelle Goldberg’s new book, “The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West” (Alfred A. Knopf: $26.95, June).
Devi, born Eugenia Peterson in 1899 in Riga, Latvia, is a fascinating character: Constantly searching as she moves from Eastern Europe to India to Shanghai and the United States, she changes names, marries twice, acts and dances — finally making it big about halfway through her century-long life as a yoga teacher, author and lecturer.
“One of the keys to her personality is that she was a stateless person and made a virtue of that,” Goldberg says by phone from New York. “There’s something almost supernatural about her willingness to start over at almost any point in her life.”
Researching the book made Goldberg think about her own yoga practice in Brooklyn. “There is a sort of magic to yoga when you don’t kind of quite know where it comes from and what is an ancient esoteric secret. So I guess it’s a bit of a loss when you realize it’s British army calisthenics repurposed,” she says. “At the same time, I used to have a bit of anxiety about authenticity that I’ve kind of gotten over.”
Goldberg, who wrote “Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism” and “The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World,” started practicing yoga during a trip to India. While she “wasn’t sure she could chant ‘Om’ with a straight face,” she eventually became hooked.
As history, Goldberg’s book is lots of fun, running through the Russian Revolution, Indian independence, 1950s Hollywood and 1960s counterculture. “The Goddess Pose” shows how Devi, and those around her, became attracted to yoga alongside what we might now call New Age philosophies.
Devi, or Peterson, as she was then known, first learned about yoga as a teenager in 1914, in the library of the Moscow home of family friends. “All around her, the country was turning into hell— and she was learning a lesson that would serve her for the rest of her long life: how to survive her world collapse by reinventing herself,” Goldberg writes.
At the end of 1927, Devi said farewell to a fiancé and finally left for India, soon joining the traveling entourage of the renown Krishnamurti. In the 1930s, hatha yoga began to gain a reputation as a “wholesome indigenous science of health and longevity,” Goldberg writes. While Indians had done yoga for thousands of years, their “practices didn’t necessarily have anything in common with yoga as currently understood by the West, as a series of poses and breathing exercises designed to strengthen the body and calm the mind.”
In 1947 she left for Los Angeles, “the ideal place” for starting anew, Goldberg notes. Devi opened a yoga studio on the Sunset Strip and started to teach “a commonsense exercise and relaxation system, utterly practical and wholesome, promising transformative results without the grunting agony of other physical culture regimens.”