Mark Singleton

It is 20th century, 1920.

People do not like us if I tell this, but there's a very convincing book by Mark Singleton on this subject matter.

Yeah,

true.

The tricks like the ascetics are doing these days.

Up to today in India.

And Mark Singleton wrote a beautiful book about his modern posture yoga.

That is so fascinating.

Yeah.

I want to point out on the back, you've got some incredibly high praise from yoga scholars as well as pretty senior teachers, including Sharon Gannon, scholar Newt Jacobson, but no less than Mark Singleton.

who writes an accessible and comprehensive study by one of the brightest voices in yoga scholarship today.

There is no other book on the topic of modern yoga that presents the subject with such mastery, clarity, and care for the reader's experience.

So congratulations.

Well, thank you.

I mean, I'm extremely flattered, but I would have to say immediately that I wouldn't be even considering writing a book, never mind being able to do it, were it not for the work of Mark Singleton.

And although I haven't just sort of copy pasted his writing, I have drawn on it extensively, not just in Yoga Body, but the work he then went on to do with Jim Mallinson in Roots of Yoga.

So it got eaten by rats or ants in the Calcutta library.

And well, this is a story that, as you say, that everyone kind of everyone took on before people like Elizabeth D. Michaelis and Mark Singleton started to, let's open up the discourse slightly on other influences that came into this situation that we find ourselves with this modern asana practice that we assumed was not quite so varied, or how do I say it? So multifaceted in terms of...

So modern.

So modern, okay.

And there was a huge transverse of information back and forth, you know, and going back and coming back again in different forms and a kind of a great cross-pollination, really, that we still see unaccounted for now, of course, because I think it's alluring.

Obviously, it's an attractive idea that we would like our modern yoga to come purely and directly from India, from the source, unadulterated, non-Western, non-rational, nothing that we know, nothing that's more humdrum and completely mystical.

And that's kind of an ideal that I was... quite attracted to and very upset i have to say when when mark singleton's book on the yoga body came out and i had the idea that there were other influences on the tradition that i'd learned from batabi joyce and shirat joyce other than simply that this this yoga karunta mythology i was going to point out the fact though that madhva dasaji did have an esoteric background i mean he was a he wasn't a judge in in the court i think in um where was he where was he before he left Calcutta or Chennai or Madras.

I think he was schooled in Calcutta, but I don't know where he worked.

So I was quite resistant myself.

10 or 11 years ago, particularly I think when Mark Singleton's Yoga Body came out, and I first read that, it completely kind of destroyed a lot of the ideas and a lot of the assumptions that I'd really made about physical yoga and postural practice.

And I was very resistant and not sure, I wasn't sure whether I really believed some of the things He was saying, and it took me quite a few years and reading that book several times to really come to appreciate it.

It's a remarkable piece of work.

But I was expecting more pushback than I've had.

I think times have changed, to be honest, James.

There was this moment where, this is what Mark Singleton had the unfortunate luck to experience, was he broke out of the academic silo into the mainstream and people became aware of this and suddenly yoga scholarship was on their radar and he was building on that.

many years of research going back you know norman showman and before even yeah but he ended up kind of in the spotlight and in the firing line as a result because that was the first people had heard and they wanted to make it go away whereas now 10 15 years on um there is not necessarily acceptance but uh less of a surprise that more research in that vein has continued and also people are prepared to admit grudgingly that perhaps things can't be documented but so long as one is treating them with respect then okay it can be accepted that academics do their thing over there we just don't really want to listen to it

I, I...

But I didn't, until I'd reread, uh, Mark Singleton's article on relaxationism, I suddenly went, "Hang on a minute," and I realized, "I'm sure I've got Shakti Gawain's Creative Visualization somewhere here."

Wow.

I hadn't made that connection either, and the connection that, that Mark really makes is that this is a real strong influence on, on the development of modern yoga.

... like it's ...

Yeah

YeahBut also you've got, like, things that, that, that, that Mark Singleton brings into that is, like, the development of hypnotherapy-

Right