page_title: Asana
section_title: For women
hierarchical_section_title: Asana / Purposes / For women
caption_attribution_description: English: "Seal" posture in the Harmonial Gymnastics of Mollie Bagot Stack, from Building the Body Beautiful, the Bagot Stack Stretch-and-Swing System, 1931. It closely resembles Salabhasana, locust pose, an asana in modern hatha yoga.
context_page_description: An asana is a body posture, originally and still a general term for a sitting meditation pose, and later extended in hatha yoga and modern yoga as exercise, to any type of pose or position, adding reclining, standing, inverted, twisting, and balancing poses. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali define "asana" as "[a position that] is steady and comfortable". Patanjali mentions the ability to sit for extended periods as one of the eight limbs of his system. Asanas are also called yoga poses or yoga postures in English.
  The 10th or 11th century Goraksha Sataka and the 15th century Hatha Yoga Pradipika identify 84 asanas; the 17th century Hatha Ratnavali provides a different list of 84 asanas, describing some of them. In the 20th century, Indian nationalism favoured physical culture in response to colonialism. In that environment, pioneers such as Yogendra, Kuvalayananda, and Krishnamacharya taught a new system of asanas. Among Krishnamacharya's pupils were influential Indian yoga teachers including Pattabhi Jois, founder of Ashtanga vinyasa yoga, and B.K.S. Iyengar, founder of Iyengar yoga.
context_section_description: In the West, yoga is practiced mainly by women. For example, in Britain in the 1970s, women formed between 70 and 90 percent of most yoga classes, as well as most of the yoga teachers. It has been suggested that yoga was seen as a support for women in the face of male-dominated medicine, offering an alternative approach for chronic medical conditions, as well as to beauty and ageing, and it offered a way of meeting other women. Singleton notes that women in yoga are in the tradition of Mollie Bagot Stack's 1930 League of Health and Beauty, influenced by Stack's visit to India in 1912 when she learnt some asanas, and in turn of Genevieve Stebbins's Harmonic Gymnastics.
caption: "Seal" posture from Mary Bagot Stack's Building the Body Beautiful, 1931. It closely resembles Salabhasana, locust pose; she had learnt some asanas in India in 1912.[109]
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