Millions of people practise yoga, attracted to the mat by its promise of physical and mental benefits, social connection, and spiritual nourishment. Promoted as a way of healing the body and mind from wounds inflicted by the world, modern yoga may be a critique of the social order – an “anti-world” to which practitioners escape. Yet yoga can never free itself entirely from the compromises and contradictions of the real world.

In *Yogalands *Paul Bramadat wrestles with his position as a skeptical scholar who is also a devoted yoga practitioner. Drawing from his own experience, and from conversations with hundreds of yoga teachers and students in the United States and Canada, he seeks to understand what yoga means for people in the modern West. In doing so, he addresses issues that often sit beneath the surface in yogaland: why yoga’s religious dimensions are rarely mentioned in classes; how the relationship between yoga and trauma might be reconsidered; and how yoga seems to have survived debates around nationalism, cultural appropriation, and sexual misconduct.

Yogalands encourages practitioners and critics to be more curious about yoga. For insiders, this can deepen their practice, and for observers, this approach is an inspiring and unsettling model for engaging with other passionate commitments.

Paul Bramadat is a professor and director of the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria. His previous works include Religious Radicalization in Canada and Beyond and Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada both published by University of Toronto Press.

Paul Bramadat's profile page

“Bramadat unpacks and culturally and conceptually situates yoga practitioners’ prevailing attitudes toward authenticity, authority, their relationship to religion, and experiences of health, the body, and trauma. I love the way Yogalands meets practitioners on their own terms while maintaining a critical perspective.” Anya P. Foxen, author of Inhaling Spirit: Harmonialism, Orientalism, and the Western Roots of Modern Yoga