No Coffee, No Prāṇa: Coffee Culture and the Krishnamacharya Yoga Lineage

This paper will explore how coffee culture and yoga intersect in anglophone postural yoga with reference to the lineage of the formative guru T. Krishnamacharya (1888-1989) and his disciples B.K.S. Iyengar (1918-2014) and K. Pattabhi Jois (1915-2009). Iyengar’s Light on Yoga (1966) famously recommends drinking coffee—even on an empty stomach—before practicing yoga postures (āsana), and Jois is famously quoted as having said “no coffee, no prāṇa (life energy).” These attitudes are reflective of the shifting social and cultural ethos that modern yoga was situated within and of deeper Indian philosophical conceptions regarding the use of herbs (oṣadhi) as an exogenous adjunct to the endogenous self-discipline of yoga. This duality is evident in the late 20th century embrace of postural yoga by coffee-friendly upwardly mobile North Americans and in the framing of coffee as an invigorating āyurveda-like herb (oṣadhi) providing a remedy to physical dispositions antagonistic to yoga practice.