Blog
Yogic Studies news, writings, interviews, media, and other vṛttis.
Interview with Accessible Yoga Part 1: Early History of Yoga for People with Disabilities
"Ascetics Performing Tapas," South India c. 1820, Opaque watercolor on paper, 23.5 x 29 cm., The British Museum.
Part 1/4 of Seth Powell's interview with Patrice Priya Wagner from Accessible Yoga. Reposted with permission. The original post can be found here.
[Priya]
The Ancient Yoga Strap: A Brief History of the Yogapaṭṭa
Guest blogpost for The Luminescent. Original post can be found here: http://www.theluminescent.org/2018/06/the-ancient-yoga-strap-yogapatta.html
Download as a PDF.
Abstract
This article will provide a small window onto the longue duree of the yogapatta, or “yoga strap,” and introduce a brief selection of the textual, visual, and material sources available for constructing its history. It will demonstrate that although the use of a yoga strap in postural yoga is typically credited as an “invention” of BKS Iyengar in the 1960s, the notion of a cloth...
Podcast Interview with The Humboldt Lighthouse
In Seth's first-ever Podcast interview, he sits down with Nate Hanks at The Humboldt Lighthouse. Recorded live in McKinleyville, California. In this conversation, Seth and Nate discuss Seth’s journey into yoga and academia, yoga philosophy and meditation practice, the Yogasūtras, travels and fieldwork in India, the PhD at Harvard, the dissertation project on the Śivayogapradīpikā, controversies over the teaching of yoga in public schools, and much more!
Listen to the episode here: ...
New Publication on the History of Āsana: "Etched in Stone"
My article, "Etched in Stone: Sixteenth-century Visual and Material Evidence of Śaiva Ascetics and Yogis in Complex Non-seated Āsanas at Vijayanagara" has been published in the inaugural issue of the new peer-reviewed Journal of Yoga Studies (JoYS).
Click here to download a PDF of the article.
Abstract
This article reassesses the history of postural yoga in precolonial India by drawing attention to recently discovered visual material evidence of non-seated postures carved onto the pillars of Vijayanagara temples at Hampi in Karnataka. Based on...
Interview with Impossible Yoga
Online interview with Benedetta Panisson at Impossible Yoga. Bilingual transcript available in Italian and English.
http://www.impossibleyoga.com/2018/01/24/seth-powell-yogic-studies/
Advice on Āsana in the Śivayogapradīpikā
Guest blogpost for The Luminescent.
Original post can be found here: http://theluminescent.blogspot.ca/2017/06/advice-on-asana-in-sivayogapradipika.html
Download as a PDF.
"The Śivayogapradīpikā (c. 15th century), or “Lamp on Śiva’s Yoga” is an important and overlooked late-medieval yoga text from south India that uniquely integrates the theory and praxis of yoga within the devotional framework (bhakti) of ritual worship (pūjā). Little scholarly attention has yet been brought to bear on this text, although its prominence...
Haṭha Yoga Project Promo Video
In September 2016 a workshop for twenty scholars working on critical editions of Sanskrit texts on yoga was held at SOAS and All Souls, Oxford.
Look out for Seth Powell's cameo in the video ;)
The Haṭha Yoga Project (HYP) is a five-year (2015-2020) research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and based at SOAS, University of London. The project aims to chart the history of physical yoga practice by means of philology (i.e., the study of texts on yoga), and ethnography (i.e., fieldwork among practitioners of yoga).
The project team consists of four researchers...
