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Paper short abstract:

Womb yoga is a women’s wellbeing practice developed in the UK over the last two decades. This ethnographic paper examines the intersections of national and transnational networks in the emergence of womb yoga and describes its transnational spread through workshops and a global Facebook group.

Paper long abstract:

Womb yoga is a women’s wellbeing practice that was developed in the UK over the last two decades by the feminist yoga teacher and therapist Uma Dinsmore-Tuli. It builds on yoga as transmitted in transnational lineage-based schools, notably Iyengar and Satyananda yoga, but adapts and expands these practices to suit women’s bodies and experiences. As such, it continues the pioneering work of some female yoga teachers who grew up in the UK, in particular the yoga approach for pregnancy, birth and mothering developed by Françoise Freedman and the free style, fluid yoga taught by Angela Farmer. It substantially expands this work by integrating the philosophy and mythology of śakta tantra in reference to scholarly texts of Indologists and by reinterpreting and reimagining tantric traditions in line with Anglo-American goddess spirituality.

This paper first examines the intersections of national and transnational networks in the emergence and development of womb yoga. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, it further describes the transnational spread of the practice through workshops taught mostly in Europe and through a global Facebook group created in the aftermath of #Me Too and aimed at eradicating the abuse of women in yoga. As such, this paper contributes to document the proliferation of new forms of yoga in the contemporary spiritual field. It explores the transnational dynamics that sustain these new developments and highlights how their centre of gravity is situated in English-speaking countries, English being the main language for teaching and dissemination.