Women and Yoga
A History of Female Practitioners
12-hour online course
with Ruth Westoby
Now available for Self-Study
Where are all the women in the history of yoga? What traditionally has been the role of female practitioners? How have the gendered demographics of yoga changed over the millennia?
Join Ruth Westoby (SOAS, PhD Candidate), and a global cohort of students, for this unique and timely opportunity to study the history of women and yoga.
Women + Yoga
This online course offers a broad survey of the history of female yoga practitioners drawing on rich narrative and visual accounts of practitioners. We will bring this historical material into conversation via key themes and analytical approaches. The course explores gender from metaphysics to bodily maps and probes how these relate to lives lived. Participants are asked to dialogue with the material explored, to challenge their perceptions and motivations to practise and study.
Course Modules
Module 1 — Herstory
This module begins by framing our inquiry into the history of female practitioners by asking us to reflect on our histories as students and perhaps practitioners of yoga. It offers interpretive strategies for approaching history—our own and others—drawing on critical pedagogical approaches. This session sketches broad historical outlines and key themes. What do we mean by female, what do we mean by yoga? What does a chronology of female practitioners look like through stone, art and word? How is gender used as an organising principle in metaphysics, particularly cosmogony and philosophy, in Vedic hymns and Sāṃkhya philosophy? The role of women in Indian society is circumscribed by law texts and extolled in myth. We will explore the tales and spiritual negotiations of ‘perfect wives’ and philosophers—Lopamudrā, Maitreyī, Gargī, Gandharī, and Sulabhā—and consider how they relate to lives lived: who told the tales and why?
Module 2 — Haṭhayoginīs
The second module tells the tales of ascetic practitioners such as Pārvatī and investigates the lack of women in the Haṭhayoga sources—asking why this is so. Widening the frame we consider ascetic and devotional practices more broadly—as figured by the female poetess from Kashmir, Lal Ded—before exploring in detail the term yoginī. This opens to a discussion of tantra and the ‘divine feminine’. Where does this leave Haṭhayoginīs—especially those portrayed in Mughal era imagery—are these depictions of practitioners or erotic fetishizations?
Module 3 — Blood: Locating Female Practitioners
This third module locates female practitioners in the haṭha corpus through their blood, rajas. Drawing on her recent research Ruth outlines paradigms of the yogic body—kuṇḍalinī, bindu/rajas, and more ascetic models—before detailing those rare but specific accounts of female practitioners in the haṭha sources. We will also briefly explore Daoist internal alchemy (nüdan) to offer a speculative but enticing comparative study.
Module 4 — Dynamics of Gender in Modern Yoga
The final session asks why modern global yoga is so dominated by female practitioners, at such stark contrast with the premodern South Asian story? This module outlines key lenses and themes: femininism, neoliberalism and body politics, appropriation, power and abuse. These themes are illustrated via an anecdotal history of women in modern yoga—the enigmatic Helena Blavatsky, Genevieve Stibbens, Molly Bagot Stack, Indra Devi, and Yogini Sunita. We will conclude the course by coming full circle: what are we doing when we look for a history of female practitioners? What does this say about us, and the future of the study and practice of yoga?
All students enrolled in this course will receive:
- 4 pre-recorded video lectures (90 min)
- 4 pre-recorded Zoom Q&A sessions (90 min)
- 4 ACP credits
- 12 Hours of CE credit with YA
- Course Syllabus (PDF)
- Weekly Readings (PDF)
- 4 Multiple Choice Quizzes (for fun)
- 4 Weekly Handouts (PDF)
- Yogic Studies Certificate upon completion (PDF)
- Access to the private Yogic Studies Online Community Forum
Your Instructor
Ruth Westoby is a doctoral candidate at SOAS, University of London, researching for a doctoral thesis on the yogic body in premodern Sanskrit texts on haṭhayoga, under the supervision of Dr. James Mallinson.
As well as offering workshops and lectures at studios and conferences, Ruth teaches on some of the principal teacher training programmes in the UK and beyond. She facilitates Yogacampus’ online History of Yoga course and serves on the steering committee for the SOAS Centre of Yoga Studies.
Ruth is also a longtime Ashtanga practitioner. She began to explore yoga practices in 1996 and started teaching postural yoga in 2004. In 2010 she received an MA in Indian Religions from SOAS with Distinction. In 2016-17 Ruth collaborated with the Haṭha Yoga Project’s ‘embodied philology’, interpreting postures from the 18th-century Haṭhābhyāsapaddhati, an important textual precursor of modern yoga. The film has been showed as part of the Haṭha Yoga Project’s Embodied Liberation exhibition in 2020.
Enrollment is OPEN for Self-Study
Sign up today and receive immediate access to all modules with one of the following tuition options:
Subscription
$75
PER MONTH
- Access to YS 111
- Access to all YS + BS courses—including live and future courses
- Access to SKT 100a + SKT 100b
This course is eligible for 12 hours of Continued Education (CE) credits with Yoga Alliance
"I found this course deeply enriching. Ruth has a beautiful way of weaving different themes together and presenting them in a thorough but accessible way."
Emanuela Mangiarotti, PhD
Italy
"This is an extremely inspiring course, not only because Ruth Westoby is clearly at the forefront of Yoga and Women issues, but also because of the community that was formed in her care. Ruth created a very encouraging environment to reflect on topics about yoga, women, history, and our views and interests. "
YS 111 Student
"Ruth is a fountain of knowledge and extremely passionate about the topic. Her research is extensive and she is open to explore challenging questions and intriguing concepts and connections. This is an especially essential course as we change the narrative from a patriarchal, male-dominated society/mode of thinking to reframe and reclaim herstory."
YS 111 Student
"This is course is very inspiring and well-structured. It helps you to reflect on where your practice is coming from and the context of Yoga when related to the place women have. It has the right balance of academic inputs (lots of reference for further studies provided) and a practitioner perspective. It has motivated me to keep exploring additional streams of research but also to go deeper into self reflections related to "my yoga practice". "
YS 111 Student
"Ruth is a very engaging and personable instructor. She eloquently illustrated challenging ideas about the history of yoga in relation to women's roles in life, and concepts of gender. There was plenty of open time for our livestream online community to discuss the curation of her richly layered course materials. I highly recommend any course Ruth teaches."
