Fear of Yoga

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In Hartford, Connecticut, of all places, there arose the unsung hero of the yoga revolution, a political correspondent and columnist for the Hartford Courant named Jack Zaiman. Nobody has yet given JZ the credit he deserves. Zaiman, a gym rat by his own lights, looks from his photograph to have been as profound a square as can be imagined. As early as 1953, Zaiman put his credibility on the line by proclaiming: 'I Am a Yoga.' Never mind the weird syntax, let us here and now give props to Jack, who went on to write a goodly number of columns extolling the virtues of yoga for the next 10 years. 'Now don't laugh,' he began in 1955, 'it may sound like a gag but it's not. I think the most important book in my library is a small volume on Yoga written by a woman named Indra Devi.'

It was no gag. Zaiman took his book to the Y to practice headstands and, conscious of it or not, started the next great leap forward in the advance of yoga in America. In the mid-1950s, everyday people assembled in meeting rooms and gyms at YWCAs and YMCAs to give yoga a try. Why not? We had already tried Latin dancing. The classes spread from neighborhood to neighborhood, from Inglewood to Westwood in L.A., and from Oak Park to La Grange in Chicago. There was still a 'Ripley's Believe It or Not!' approach to yoga among journalists, evident in the tale about a visiting yogi who drank acid, chewed on broken glass, and told reporters that if yoga was practiced long enough, it could protect humanity from a nuclear attack. 'Yoga Best A-Bomb Control After 12 Years, Says Yogi' was the headline in the Hartford Courant, but by the decade's end, the tide had turned; only loonies considered yoga to be dangerous anymore. Heck, even Gary Cooper practiced yoga to relax.

The 1960s began with Frances P. Bolton, a 74-year-old congresswoman from Ohio, telling a radio interviewer that she loved yoga and had learned it back in the 1920s. United Press International picked up the story and put it out on the wires. Bolton was unafraid to be seen as weird, and she was a Republican, too. Take that, Eleanor. In 1961 the Los Angeles Times began a landmark multipart series called 'What's Yoga?' and Richard Hittleman's Yoga for Health TV show replaced Jack LaLanne in some markets.

By mid-decade, the New York Times estimated that yoga practitioners numbered between 20,000 and 100,000. Then in 1967 the Beatles crossed paths with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who was preaching a brand of meditation-based yoga that he trademarked Transcendental Meditation. 'Beatle Says They've Given Up Drugs' was the headline in the Washington Post coverage that summer (that was Paul talking, though their sobriety was extremely temporary, as it turned out). The Beatles made plans to go to India, and the American counterculture lit some incense and followed in spirit. We went mad for yoga-well, for all things Eastern. Mia Farrow, Mick Jagger, Donovan, and others trailed the Beatles to India to spend a few months deepening their study.

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