The Path of Modern Yoga: The History of an Embodied Spiritual Practice

In the early twentieth century, yoga underwent a massive transition from spiritual practice to focusing on health and fitness. In this book, author Elliott Goldberg chronicles this shift through examining the lives of eleven key figures in this huge change. He argues that instead of desecrating a sacred tradition, this change moved yoga from solitary and inaccessible to embodied, spiritual, and open to everyone.

The Path of Modern Yoga: The History of an Embodied Spiritual Practice may change how readers look at yoga over the last century. Using historical context and biography to tell this story, Goldberg takes a powerful idea–that of yoga becoming “an embodied spiritual practice” and accessible to everyone–and compiles it into this dense, highly detailed, and exhaustive examination of the transformation of yoga from spiritual to physical and back again. While this book delves deep into the subject, using more than ten years of rare, original research, and is perhaps more scholarly in nature than some readers might want or require in a yoga book, it is a remarkable book for the interested yogi.