Product Review

"Yoga Ph.D." explores contemporary yoga from the unique perspective of a political science professor-turned-yoga teacher. Like most Americans, Carol Horton started studying yoga in search of nothing more than stretching and stress relief. Over time, however, yoga revealed itself to be a powerful yet subtle tool for exploring her body, mind, and the connections between them in ways she’d never previously imagined possible. This caused her to wonder: What is yoga, really? Where did it come from? Why has it become so popular? And what does it offer us, as individuals and a society?

In "Yoga Ph.D.," Carol integrates her diverse experiences as yoga practitioner and social scientist to provide provocative answers to these questions. Contemporary yoga, she notes, is a paradoxically multidimensional practice, pursued for everything from physical fitness to spiritual transformation – simultaneously commercial and mystical, recreational and therapeutic, scientific and esoteric. To make sense of such incongruities, Carol synthesizes personal reflections on her own practice with a research-based analysis of yoga as a sociocultural phenomenon. The result is a book that breaks new ground by offering a sympathetic yet critical analysis of the promise and pitfalls of American yoga.