D.C. Book Event / 7pm, August 21

Join journalist and author Michelle Goldberg for a reading from her new book, The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West.
Friday, August 21, 2015 at 7 p.m.

Indra Devi (1899-2002) was pivotal to the popularization of yoga in the West; as a follower first of Jiddu Krishnamurti, then a student of Krishnamacharya, and a yoga teacher well into her nineties, Devi’s credentials would seem impeccable. There’s much more to her story, however, as Goldberg, a widely published journalist,Nation senior contributing editor, and author of Kingdom Coming and The Means of Reproduction, reveals in this biography. Born in Latvia, the woman who would become Indra Devi began life as Eugenia Peterson. Fleeing the revolution, she shed her aristocratic identity for that of a performer in a Berlin cabaret troupe. Discovering Theosophy, she traveled to India where she combined a silent-movie career with training in Eastern spiritual practices, all of which ultimately led to a life dedicated to detachment, freedom, and positive attitudes.

Goldberg will be in conversation with journalist Anna Louie Sussman.

Visit the event page

More about the book

Friday, August 21, 2015 at 7 p.m.
Politics and Prose
5015 Connecticut Ave NW
ashingtonDC 20008

 

The New York Times calls The Goddess Pose "an elegant and richly drawn biography"

Look out for Sonia Faleiro's review of The Goddess Pose in this coming Sunday's New York Times Book Review, in which she writes:

Goldberg cleverly describes Devi as “an esoteric female Forrest Gump” who managed, unwittingly, to find herself in the thick of things, and indeed “The Goddess Pose” canters through landmark events from India’s independence to the American invasion of Panama...With a jeweler’s eye for detail, Goldberg presents a singular woman.

Read the full review here, or learn more and buy the book here

The Woman Who Hooked Hollywood On Yoga: The Goddess Pose Excerpted in Time Magazine

Read an excerpt from Michelle Goldberg's The Goddess Pose in this week's TIME Magazine Ideas section.TIME Ideas hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary and expertise on the most compelling events in news, society, and culture. Click Here

June 16th Author Event: Yoga in the 21st Century

Join us for a celebration of Michelle Goldberg’s new book The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman who Helped Bring Yoga to the West & to celebrate the United Nations' premiere International Day of Yoga with Michelle Goldberg & Sister Mohini Panjabi 

A discussion aimed at understanding yoga as a world practice that has the potential to cut through the differences of culture & religion, and a historical perspective on how the practice has spread west & its great popularity. On this night, we wil honor the elders who represent the practice of yoga including Indra Devi, the subject of Michelle's book, Dadi Jank, Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh and many others. Closing meditation by Sister Hohini Panjabi. 

Doors open at 6:30p; program begins at 7pm
$10 General admission 
$30 General admission (includes book)
RSVP here

About ABC Home
ABC Home is an interactive museum and a portal into collective creativity with seven floors of sustainable design, eco-fashion, global cooperatives, farm-to-table restaurants and a gallery and theatre space. As a design destination, ABC guides a conscious, influential participant to creatively commit to nurturing the planet and its communities while actualizing home as a sacred space. 

In the gallery and theatre space, ABC Home hosts conversations, wellness events, meditations and art exhibitions to present to our community the most crucial discoveries of our current world. 

ABC Carpet & Home
888 Broadway 
New York, NY 10003

I Was a Proud Non-Breeder. Then I Changed My Mind.

Twelve years ago, I penned an essay for a Salon series called “To Breed or Not to Breed,” about the decision to have children or not. It began this way: “When I tell people that I’m 27, happily married and that I don’t think I ever want children, they respond one of two ways. Most of the time they smile patronizingly and say, ‘You’ll change your mind.’ Sometimes they do me the favor of taking me seriously, in which case they warn, ‘You’ll regret it.’” The series inspired an anthology titled Maybe Baby. It was divided into three parts: “No Thanks, Not for Me,” “On the Fence,” and “Taking the Leap.” My essay was the first in the “No” section.

So I felt a little sheepish, when, a year and a half ago, the writer Meghan Daum asked me if I’d be interested in contributing to the book that would become Shallow, Selfish and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids. I wrote back to tell her that I couldn’t: My son had just turned 1. Read more

This Is What Happens When You Slash Funding for Public Universities

On February 25, three University of Arizona graduate students—Kyle Blessinger, Zach Brooks, and Sarah Ann Meggison—had a meeting with Kelli Ward, a Republican state senator in Arizona. They were there to lobby against massive new cuts to state spending on higher education; the number being thrown around was $75 million. Under the state constitution, attending the university is supposed to be as “nearly free as possible,” but due to state budget cuts, tuition had increased more than 70 percent between 2008 and 2013 for in-state students—the severest hike in the country. Now it was poised to go up even more, while funds for graduate instructors were likely to be squeezed even further.

Blessinger, a 28-year-old Air Force veteran, was particularly concerned. He’d used up his GI benefits for his undergraduate education, and with a year left before he finishes his MA in higher education, he already carries $65,000 in student debt. In the past, he had worked as a teaching assistant in two classes, which earned him a tuition waiver—but this semester, because of budget cuts, the school could only afford to give him one. To make ends meet, he was working as a bartender and freelancing as a private security guard, occasionally at parties thrown by affluent undergraduates. Read More

Early Reviews: The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West

SIGN UP FOR EMAIL UPDATES

Sign Up

Name *

Name

First Name

Last Name

Email Address *

Thank you!

The early reviews for Michelle Goldberg’s “The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West,” are in, and they are raves. “[T]his sparkling tale of a remarkable trailblazer should enlighten and inspire every reader,” says Publishers Weekly. Kirkus writes, “Fascinating reading about an intriguing woman.”  And Library Journal calls it ” “fascinating and groundbreaking,” saying, “This painstakingly researched book is more than mere biography…It helps readers to understand where yoga, as we practice it in the West, came from and how it differs from its roots.".  The Goddess Pose is available for pre-order now, and out on June 9. More about the book

In The New Yorker: The Long Marriage of Mindfulness and Money →

By Michelle Goldberg

Last month, on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Deepak Chopra described the usefulness of meditation for people on Wall Street. Speaking about a friend who manages a hedge fund, he said, “His entire staff meditates. I know many others now on Wall Street that we teach, actually. It makes them much more productive, because they’re centered, they’re not distracted.” Chopra was appearing on TV to promote a free twenty-one-day online meditation course that he offers with Oprah. Its theme is “Manifesting True Success.”

Meditation, like yoga before it, has been fully assimilated into corporate America. Aetna, General Mills, and Goldman Sachs... Read it in The New Yorker

In The New Yorker: Iyengar and the Invention of Yoga

By Michelle Goldberg

In contemporary yoga classes, teachers often speak of Patanjali’s “Yoga Sutras,” a philosophical text compiled around two thousand years ago, as the wellspring of the practice. This requires an imaginative leap, because the yoga sutras say next to nothing about physical poses; their overriding concern is the workings of the mind. Yoga, the sutras say, “is the restriction of the fluctuations of consciousness.” The total of their guidance about posture is that it should be “steady and comfortable.”

Instructions for postures, or asanas, appeared much later, in medieval tantra-inflected texts, such as the “Hatha Yoga Pradipika.” Even in those works, however, you won’t find many of the positions taught today as yoga. Fifteen poses appear in the “Hatha Yoga Pradipika,” most of them seated or supine. There are no sun salutations, no downward-facing dogs or warriors. There are instructions for drawing discharged semen back into the penis, so as to overcome death, and for severing the tendon connecting the tongue to the bottom of the mouth, and lengthening it so that it can touch the forehead.

Until the twentieth century, educated Indians and Westerners alike tended to disdain the occult practices denoted by the term “hatha yoga.” “We have nothing to do with it here, because its practices are very difficult and cannot be learnt in a day, and, after all, do not lead to much spiritual growth,” wrote Swami Vivekananda, who did much to popularize yoga philosophy in the West with his 1896 book, “Raja Yoga.” Only in the modern era has hatha yoga been transformed into a wholesome, accessible regimen for health and well-being. A central figure in this transformation was B. K. S. Iyengar, the author of the 1966 yoga bible “Light on Yoga,” who died this week at the age of ninety-five.

I met Iyengar in 2010, at his institute in Pune, a city about a hundred miles south of Mumbai, where students from all over the world travelled to study with the revered yoga master. 

Read it in The New Yorker