In this open-access book launch, Magdalena Kraler presents her 2025 book Yoga Breath, which offers the first comprehensive history of modern prāṇa and prāṇāyāma, tracing their transnational expressions between 1850 and 1945. A central practice of both premodern and modern yoga, prāṇāyāma ("breath control") is practised in yoga classes worldwide. Like the notion of prāṇa (“breath”, “vitality”), prāṇāyāma has a longstanding history in South Asia, constituting the fourth limb of Patañjali’s yoga. Since roughly 1850, prāṇa and prāṇāyāma have been reinterpreted in light of the ideas of Hindu reform movements, nineteenth-century occultism, science, biomedicine, and transnational hygiene. Kraler reconstructs how prāṇa assumed a central role in the cosmological frameworks of modern yoga and how prāṇāyāma came to be understood as a form of self-cultivation. Engaging one of modern yoga’s key practices, this book not only offers a thorough academic analysis, but also responds to a growing worldwide interest in breath cultivation.
Prāṇa has become a key concept for the religious and hygienic aspirations of modern yoga. However, its significance, though most obviously relevant within prāṇāyāma practice, is even more fundamental to modern yoga’s ideas about the interconnectedness between humans and the cosmos.
Dr. Magdalena Kraler (Yoga Breath, 2025: 396).
Magdalena Kraler holds a PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Vienna (2022) and an MA in Music and Dance Education from the University Mozarteum Salzburg (2013). She is the author of Yoga Breath (2025), the first monograph to explore the history of modern prāṇa and prāṇāyāma, as well as several articles on breath-related subjects. Her research affiliations include Rabindra Bharati University in Kolkata (2019) and the University of New Mexico (2012). Having practiced yoga and other forms of bodywork for 25 years, she is interested in the scholarly and experiential exploration of yoga, prāṇāyāma, and body-mind practices more broadly. Currently, Kraler teaches music and dance at the University of Teacher Education in Graz, Austria, as well as the theory and practice of prāṇāyāma.
£0.00
