Speaker
Description
This paper seeks to contextualise Indian philosophy teacher Phiroz Mehta’s contribution to UK yoga culture between the 1930s and 1980s. It will consider how he blended Theosophy and yoga to form his own practice called 'Theorhythm' and how he pioneered health camps in Dorset during the 1930s that included Theorhythm sessions for mostly middle-class women. The paper will include interview excerpts with British yoga teachers who studied with Mehta in the 1970s and 1980s and their reflections on how his talks shaped their professional yoga teaching. Finally, the paper will assess Mehta's relationship with Fritjof Capra, author of the best-selling popular book The Tao of Physics and who studied with Mehta in London in the 1970s. [This is a follow-up paper to an article published on Mehta in 2023 in Religions.]
Dr Karen O'Brien-Kop is Lecturer in Asian Religions at King's College London. Her books include The Routledge Handbook of Yoga and Meditation Studies (with Newcombe, Routledge 2020), Rethinking 'Classical Yoga': Meditation, Metaphors and Materiality (Bloomsbury Academic 2021) and The Philosophy of the Yogasutra: An Introduction (Bloomsbury Academic 2023).
