Tracing the Genealogies of Somatic Yoga

Present-day narratives about »somatic yoga« often portray it as a novel development or retroactively project it into an imagined essence of traditional yoga. My research suggests a different perspective. Long before Thomas Hanna coined the term somatics in 1988, women such as Elsa Gindler and her student Charlotte Selver pioneered practices of embodied awareness, proprioception, and exploratory movement in early 20th-century Germany. From Gindler and Heinrich Jacoby to Selver, a Western tradition of somatic attention emerged—comparable to Zen in its insistence on presence, yet explicitly grounded in movement and bodily awareness. After emigrating to the United States, Selver carried this work into the Human Potential Movement, teaching at the Esalen Institute and working closely with Alan Watts. In these environments, she influenced circles where yoga was increasingly practiced and discussed.

 In parallel, but from a very different genealogy, the late T. Krishnamacharya and his son T. K. V. Desikachar, himself influenced by Zen, slowly developed Viniyoga, emphasizing an individualized, adaptive application of yoga. Central to this was bhāvanā, defined by Desikachar as »creating for oneself a place, an idea, an image, a vision«. Applied to āsana and prāṇāyāma, bhāvanā was cultivated as an inner quality, a passive observation, distinct from meditation, dhyāna. While this resembles the somatic principle of sensing from within, it arose from a yogic lineage rather than from European body culture.

 This paper compares these two genealogies—Western somatics and South Indian Viniyoga—as distinct yet converging ways of foregrounding embodied awareness, showing that contemporary »somatic yoga« has much to tell about the entangled history of modern yoga.