Ruth Westoby – Reversing Reproduction in Hatha Yoga
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
5:00 pm to 6:30 pm
- Venue
- SOAS University of London
- Room
- Main Building Room 201
- Event type
- Lecture
About this event
The SOAS Centre of Yoga Studies is delighted to host Dr. Ruth Westoby (SOAS Alumni) of Roehampton University, to present on the topic of “Reversing Reproduction in Haṭha Yoga.”
The yogic body is often described as an elaborate matrix of channels (nāḍīs), energies (such as prāṇa) and wheels (cakras) that the practitioner should ritually construct and manipulate in order to attain power and liberation. However, in the texts of the early haṭha corpus we find little concern with either the esoteric body or the mundane, material (jaḍa) or saṃsāric body.
Rather, the sources are practice manuals the focus of which is setting out techniques of yoga. Yet, an examination of the descriptions and principles of the body that do appear in these sources indicates that a key conceptualisation of the body relates to reproduction: the saṃsāric body is that which reproduces; the liberated body (jīvanmukti or videhamukti) is one which can be understood as reversing reproduction.
Drawing from her recently completed PhD dissertation on “The Body in Early Haṭha Yoga” Ruth Westoby offers a close analysis of key passages in texts such as the Amṛtasiddhi, Yogabīja and Khecarīvidyā to sketch concepts of reproduction and its reversal. She contextualises this within a framework of approaches to sex and reproduction that range from pronatalist to antinatalist, but nevertheless complicates an easy assumption that these approaches map only onto a strict ascetic and householder binary. She finds instead a prosaic approach to sex and sexuality.
Speaker
Dr Ruth Westoby is an academic researcher in Yoga and Asian Religions and a yoga practitioner. Her research focuses on the materiality of the body and sexuality from a critical theoretical and medical humanities perspectives. She works with Sanskrit textual sources and participant interviews.
Ruth holds a PhD from SOAS University of London on ‘The Body in early Haṭha Yoga’ (2024), supervised by Professor James Mallinson and Dr Richard Williams, funded by CHASE-AHRC. Ruth is working on a book project from her doctoral thesis that passed without corrections, ‘Reversing Reproduction in Haṭha Yoga’. Future research projects explore menstruation in religious contexts. Ruth is an Associate Researcher at Inform, the research institute specialising in contemporary religions, where she undertook a CHASE-AHRC placement in 2023. In 2022-3 she undertook a similarly funded placement at the Royal Asiatic Society working with their manuscript collections and in particular the 1363 Śārṅgadharapaddhati.
Ruth published early research findings in the peer-reviewed Religions of South Asia (2021) and numerous public articles. Ruth collaborated with the SOAS Haṭha Yoga Project (2015-2020) interpreting postures from an 18th-century text teaching a precursor of modern yoga, the Haṭhābhyāsapaddhati in 2016 and 2017. This contributed to the development of a new methodology, ‘embodied philology’. In 2010 she received an MA in Indian Religions from SOAS, University of London, with Distinction.
Ruth is Visiting Lecturer in Asian Religions at Roehampton University, teaching postgraduate theory and method in the study of religion and undergraduate courses on Asian religions, cultures and ethics, contemporary issues in global religions, being human and religion, ecology and politics. Ruth serves on the steering committee for the SOAS Centre of Yoga Studies, the Yoga in Theory and Practice Unit of the American Academy of Religions and the organising committee for YDYS 2026.
For articles and podcasts see Enigmatic Yoga.
