Texts, Teachers, and Traditions of Flemish Yoga Pioneers

This chapter explores the emergence of modern yoga practices in Flanders (Belgium) in the second half of the twentieth century as an illustration of developments that have also taken place elsewhere in Europe. My analysis is based on life story interviews that I conducted with yoga teachers who started their own yoga schools in Flanders in the 1960s. Since most of those teachers learned yoga on their own as autodidacts, books were often their primary sources of inspiration and information about yoga. This chapter maps out their textual sources and the formative role that these texts played in the development of their yoga schools. The chapter also takes into consideration the texts that these Flemish teachers valued as foundational for their yoga studies, the importance they attach to studying these texts, the traditions in which the teachers situate themselves, and the figures they regard as authoritative in those traditions. The emerging picture shows both the remarkable diversity and the similarities in how these yoga-teaching pioneers perceiving yoga.