Weeks Well presents yoga lineages

Yoga has evolved over thousands of years. It continues to reach more people as it goes global and changes in the 21st century.

When I first imagined Yoga Lineages, a series of interviews and classes I hosted with Yoga Alliance and elsewhere in 2021, I was thinking about the main modern pedagogies of yoga and how they operate in modernity. Like tensegrity in design, I wondered what aspects of this ancient philosophy, art, and science hold true to form even as the word—”yug,” in Sanskrit, or union— takes on new and more expansive aspects. As we shift from the linear age of learning to a modular, trans-generative one, we see such changes in yoga as an increasingly inclusive and global practice while, at the same time, serious consideration now given to it as legitimate preventive medicine. To this end, how does yoga approach “dis-ease”? In society, justice and yoga are treated intersectionally by activist practitioners as a way to create equity for all people. On the mat, what does yoga practice even mean or look like? How important is the teacher/student relationship now: Are we post guru?

These were among the many questions and ideas I had in the first iteration of Yoga Lineages, in which I sat down one-on-one with the heads and/or senior-most practitioners of Integral Yoga, Viniyoga, Kundalini Yoga, Iyengar Yoga, Sivananda Yoga, Ashtanga Yoga, and Kripalu Yoga.

This project continued to grow out of the inspirational collaboration and consulting work I did with Yoga Alliance, and especially from the scientific research on yoga video and blog content I produced with Dr. Sat Bir Singh Khalsa. In October 2022, I folded Yoga Lineages into the The Weeks Well podcast, which is about the modern practice of being your best self in your mind, breath, body, and brain.

Learn more