In Thinking in Āsana, Matylda Ciołkosz compares three of the most popular systems of postural yoga—Viniyoga (founded by T. K. V. Desikachar), Iyengar Yoga (founded by B. K. S. Iyengar), and Ashtanga Yoga (founded by K. Pattabhi Jois). She demonstrates how the systems’ different “yoga philosophies”—learned within social environments consisting of physical spaces, other practitioners, and teachers rooted in each system—lead to different experiences, understandings, and meanings for each system’s practitioners. Despite their founders’ shared roots as students of Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, the three systems diverge from one another in practice, experience, and philosophy of yoga. Ciołkosz examines these divergences and their effects on the creation and understanding of yoga bodies and practice within each system.
The book is divided into two primary sections. In the first, Ciołkosz provides an overview of enactive cognition, the idea that cognition develops through interactions with one’s environment and, importantly for her argument, the...
University of California Press