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Subject area: MODERN YOGA
In his book titled I Remember, Luis Sérgio Álvares DeRose -Brazilian yoga teacher and bestseller- narrates the story of an ancient Dravidian boy who has to abandon his land in northern India due to the invasion of an aggressive nomad tribe and who goes through an initiatic path of knowledge and transformation. But the story opens with the following quote by Jean Cocteau: “I've always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.” Taking the hint that this quote suggests, in the present paper we address the different stages in DeRose’s thought and analyze some aspects of the transformational mythology that DeRose elaborates as a narrative of legitimacy for his teachings.
We suggest that DeRose’s thought can be understood as having gone through three phases, so far. The first phase, as he acknowledges, is linked to Theosophy and esotericism. The following period, in which he says to have abandoned theosophical wisdom, is dedicated to the systematization and dissemination of his “Swasthya yoga” teachings and brand. In his third and current stage, DeRose declares to have gone beyond yoga since “yoga does not work”, he says, and prefers to stick with his brand newer “DeRose Method”. We also intend to show that one of the basic keys of the overarching mythology into which he subsumes his conceptions of yoga is transformation.
Gabriel Martino holds a PhD in Philosophy and works in the field of comparative Indian and Greek Philosophy. He is an Associate Researcher of the Argentinean National Research Council (CONICET) and a Visiting Research Associate of the Department of Religion at Rutgers University (USA). In 2021 he received a Fulbright scholarship to conduct a postdoctoral research project at Rutgers University focused on the notion of karman in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, under the supervision of Dr. Edwin Bryant. Martino teaches Sanskrit at the University of Buenos Aires, Greek at the Universidad del Salvador (Argentina) and Ancient Philosophy at both institutions. He is also a core member of the YoLa project, a collective research initiative on the history, adaptations and practice of yoga in Latin America
